One, the argument of national security had better not be a good reason. Nothing essential should be running on something like RIMs network. That would be dangerous and asinine. Now, it might be the case, but that needs to change, not have some ridiculous exemption that shouldn't be allowed.
Two, all laws should pertain to citizens. They are what the government serves, and that is all. If you start talking about corporations as somehow bigger than a citizen, you've already lost sight of the purpose of the government. It is to serve *the people*, not the corporations.
Three, most of the operations of the Federal government is in direct opposition to the Constitution. Why would this be any different? They ignore the majority of that document today, and this is just the latest example of the Federal doing whatever they please.
If that were the case, it would highlight an incredibly stupid group of people. Government should not rely on the private sector for critical infrastructure. Relying on RIM for emergency management notification is as foolish and amateur as relying on cell phone networks during a disaster.
There is no good reason to not shut of government use. At worst, it would get it into a few foolish people's heads that they shouldn't be doing things that way, and that they should use reliable methods of information dispersal. Having something be at the whims of a market driven private sector network for something of national security had better not only scary people, but get people fired.
Also, no, almost all uses of emminant domain are bad uses. It is wholly wrong for the government to just up and steal what you have legal rights to. If they want to fix what they've screwed up in patent law, then that is the right answer. Forcing this company to give up their property is not the right way.
First of all, copyright/patent law has been happening in the EU. If they got their way, they would've had a worse system than the US. That shows very badly for the future.
If you hadn't managed to notice, the EU is a socialist structure. That means that over time, more and more power will aggregate on the top. Then you are left with an incredibly powerful large government that can do what it wants, as all the citizens depend on it to live. Socialism is sort of guaranteed to fail, since it requires quite a few abridgments of freedom to function.
I might not agree with what happens in the US, but the constant babble about the EU being the height of government or something is ridiculous. The EU is, by default, a more restrictive setup than the US. It does not represent the citizens of the alliance, but the governments. It is not above corruption, as has been already seen. The EU is *not* any better than what the US has become.
You want to see the future of the EU? Visit the US, and then visit China. Now please knock off the bs until you go read more history and politics.
Surprisingly enough, it often does come down to money. Sure, the difference in price for 16MB vs 32MB isn't much when you're putting together a PC for yourself, but the difference of a few dollars is of major importance when you're doing mass market. Companies often make choices about knocking a few cents off the price of something by messing about with vendors.
Funny, but honestly, you know damn well that if that was the only condition for you getting the job, then the company is staffed by idiots. All that established is that you would probably use the right tool for the job.
You aren't going to write the fastest code possible if you don't bother to learn the quirks of the compiler. The same would be true of the run-time optimizations of Java. You won't write good code if you refuse to learn what you need to know.
No cell phone games written in Java do this. I can quite confidently state this, as Sun says it will take more than that just for the JRE. See any number of other comments around this post. Go read teh J2ME docs.
malloc and free can be pretty slow if you do it wrong. You can also write your program so that it isn't a performance issue. The same thing can be pretty slow in any language. No surprise that poor coding skills equal poor applications. You can also cherry-pick your apps to give you the numbers you want. PERL and GhostScript are interpreters; it is no surprise that they spend a lot of time doing memory management.
They could've also mentioned Java as a C application, but they didn't, because that would've defeated that point. Just because one app doesn't run well doesn't mean that all C apps will do the same.
See, that right there is a huge chunk of the whole problem. If programmers weren't being lazy and arrogant jerks and assuming that nobody cares about how poorly designed and coded their algorithms are, or how blatently horrible their memory usage is, we would have a lot fewer problems.
I don't care that Java will get there at some point, or that it's better now. I care about whether it actually works right, and right now it does not. It does have too long a startup, most of the UI toolkits are horribly slow, it does not follow native platform UI conventions, and it is just not as nice to use a Java app as it is an equally well written native app. It does take far too memory, especially compared to other languages. Even the cross-platform nature of the code is largely a lie. Different JREs don't support the same things, and many platforms lack a JRE. There are massive differences between the various editions of Java so as to make it useless to try to write something across them. Your Java app written against "Vendor X Version Y Edition Z JRE" should work fine on any other platform with the same version of "Vendor X Version Y Edition Z JRE". That's all you can safely say without a good amount more testing.
However, most of all, my CPU time and RAM might be cheap, but they are abused every time I use an application written in that mindset. I have memory needlessly abused, and CPU time needlessly wasted every time I run some poorly coded program. That means that I lose time and productivity every time I run your poorly written app. That attitude pisses me off, why we should all squander our system resources so that a few lazy programmers can write some app a little faster and with less effort, rather than doing their job right.
Programmer cycles are a lot cheaper than making thousands of people upgrade their hardware. I imagine those programmer cycles are a few orders of magnitude cheaper.
In the Dell servers that I've purchased since 2000, I have three different types of enclosures for drives. None of the systems came with additional enclosures, so you have to contact Dell and order more. The last time I tried ordering the older style enclosure (24xx series), I was informed by Dell that I would only be able to get refurbished versions of them. To make that even more annoying, you have to order the screws separately.
There isn't good reason to have different enclosures for SATA vs. SCSI. They do the same thing and having more common parts is better.
The rest of my post is easily proven by actually reading reviews or reading the Dell web site.
They were right there throwing a fit, just like when any tech advance happens that might threaten their model.
The Audio Home Recording Act was passed in response to the release of DAT, but it exempted formats that were primarily used for data or video. It forced royalties onto the recorders and blank media for products targetted at audio. As a result of the exemption for data, CD-Rs avoided this problem, since CD burners were targetted primarily for data use.
No, DAT mostly failed because of massive pressures from the various recording cartels. Something about perfect digital copies of content and not a good enough way of preventing everyone from being able to get another perfect copy. As a result, prices were forced to stay high, and nobody ever bought into it. I believe there was even a tax placed on DAT that made it more expensive.
OK, that is *soo* hard to work around. "Support is available between 8am and 6pm M-F, excluding major holidays." Then, for a large additional fee, you can offer them even better support, with more hours, and maybe onsite service.
This is what being in that market is all about. So nobody else should ever sell white-box systems with support, because Dell already does that? People never get ahead in the world with that kind of hefty lack of entreprenueral spirit.
#1- On a home desktop, gold support is the *only* available level of support. They call it gold to sucker people into thinking it's somehow special. All it does is get you off hold faster and confuse the support issue. The one that actually matters is "hardware support". Basically, you got screwed if your parts weren't *always* there the next business day. The base hardware support plan (the one that is included with any machine purchase) gives you a 3 year warranty with 3 year next business day on-site service. Unless you bought from the "home" store, which is a mistake, since Dimensions are crap. Hell, you must be since I don't think this "Gold support" thing is an option in any other store.
The only thing you accomplish by getting "gold technical support" is giving Dell another $70 for doing what they should be doing anyway. It is not a warranty in any way at all. Regardless, the "Home/Home Office" store is the wrong place to buy anything from.
#2- Dell uses several non-standard components that serve no purpose except to try to lock you into Dell. One good example is that they switch around a few pins on their ATX power supply. This means that you can't just up and use a different P/S or motherboard, or reuse either in another machine.
You obviously haven't seen too many parts from a Dell. They do annoying things like that all the time, like using different hot-swap drive enclosures on almost every model, leaving out cabling that would allow expansion (like by providing you with another power connector), or making their cases so that if you buy a device from someone else, your case looks like crap because you don't have the right stupid plastic face to put over the device.
Anyway, gold support really is trash and there are plenty of Dell parts that won't just work in another machine, and sometimes not in another Dell. A home user that is willing to buy a Dell Dimension is probably not into hardware enough to run into that.
This is the method that we all said we would prefer. I don't understand why people are all up in arms over this; would it be better if they were throwing lawsuits around instead of beating people at their own game? Really, I prefer this way anyway, and it has the fringe benefit of getting people get to try to design better protocols. This keeps sounds more and more preferable to lawsuits.
Besides all of that, I really don't have a problem with people downloading broadcast TV shows. I honestly think the legal system shouldn't have a problem with it either, since it was broadcast and all. Now, the courts probably would take issue, seeing to how the industry bought so many wonderful laws. But that isn't the point.
The problem here is that/Rome/ wasn't broadcast, so it doesn't count. HBO is a somewhat pricy subscription based cable TV network, so their content never hit the air in any form of open format. This is like throwing DVD rips up on a BT tracker and wondering why whoever bankrolled the movie is a little peeved.
No, a derivative work is a work that is based upon a previous work. Random data, or part of a data stream that constitute the show, are not derivative works at all. Derivative works must be unique creations, too.
I don't want to see DNS run by this level of politics. Even though governements are using it, it is basically a commercially funded and operated venture. It exists through private cooperation. I don't agree with the argument that the US should run it because it always has, but I don't agree that the US should have to give it up because the UN said so.
The only way that I would go along with a change is if it became a completely industry controlled system. If government is more heavily involved, it will not be any better.
As it stands, nobody has to use the existing root servers; that is voluntary. Putting it in the UN puts it under the whims of random, and potentially much more hostile, countries. It is just not the right place for this sort of thing.
Oh, I agree with you that the US government is out of control. I'm a proponent of federalism, which is quite opposite of what the US is doing now. I don't agree with Pres. Bush's policies, but I also don't agree with what the UN and co. are doing either. Right now DNS is actually run by various companies and such, and it is working fine. The US government does not exercise control over any of it. Now, if they started to try to influence the operation of DNS, then my opinion would change.
Right now, the way the UN is trying to do this is wrong. DNS is working the way it is. The UN doing what they are talking about would actually destabilise the whole system. If other countries are worried, they should be encouraging their businesses to host root servers. Then if the US starts pulling anything, these roots would already be in position to take the US influenced servers out of the loop.
I'm not argueing that the US isn't wrong, but that the UN *is* wrong. It is simply a poor way for them to try to do this. Having the UN in charge will make things much much worse. Look at the track record for UN commissions... If the US being having influence bothers you, then what of China, Libya, N. Korea, Iran, or so many others.
All of those things are voluntary coordination and cooperation between various companies, sometimes with the aid of treaty. For example, tariff, copyrights, and patents have to be done by government, but they are coordinated by asking countries to be involved voluntarily. Telephones, mail, and finance are handled by companies, cooperating voluntarily to further their business interests. Sometimes governments get involved in those things, but not always.
The EU did become a lawmaking body, of sorts, but the pretense under which it was formed was as an economic alliance. Even now, each country has to actually enact local laws that implement EU directive, and some choose not to. See England and their continued use of Pounds as primary currency, just for one example. Otherwise you would have provinces governed by the EU instead of seperate countries. Unfortunately, under that situation, Europe really would have finished turning in the modern US.
Anyway, my larger point is that most international issues of this type are handled by voluntary cooperation of private sector interests. There is no need for the UN to be involved.
No, you have it wrong right from the start. The US is not using force to do anything on the matter. The UN/EU/whoever is *attempting* to use force to take DNS for themselves. Got it yet? US="no force" and UN="force". The US is not using any force for this. The UN is saying "give that to us right now", and the US is just saying "no, we will not give it to you". This would be the same as if the US said "France, you will give us your trains" and France said "No, go to hell", and then the US whined to the UN, and the UN tried to tell France to give them their trains. This whole thing is bunk and it has been conducted in a childish and incorrect way.
Foreign countries can have all the concerns they want, but they do not control what the US does, just as the US does not control what Germany does. They cannot simple *tell* the US that they aren't allowed to run DNS anymore. Like has been said so many times, if they want to run their own DNS, there is nothing stopping them, but they have no way to *take it by force*, be it political or otherwise.
We don't let the UN run the telephone numbering system, or postal systems, or ANY COUNTRY'S INFRASTRUCTURE. This should be no different at all.
I am not socialist nor communist nor do I support a global government of any type, nor anything that looks like those three. They all heavily limit freedom. I also don't support the current way the government in the US is running things. I *definitely* don't support the UN attempting to do anything that isn't invited by the countr(y|ies) in question. You might feel the need to argue the point, but the idea of "one true world government" in fact requires limitation of freedom, and at the very least, it is socialism. It removes choice, and forces that if you disagree with the will of the government, your *only* course of action is revolution.
You don't seem to be able to comprehend that the *UN* actions are the use of force, and the *US* actions are a lack of force. The UN is attempting to *FORCE* the US to give up DNS. The US already has DNS, and simply has to not cede control.
However, back on topic, the only right way to change DNS is to remove government from it entirely. Giving it to the UN is making it worse.
1. Spoofing would be very bad, considering what that would do to the IP routing. They would have to spoof IP addresses on a multinational level, screwing with routing tables everywhere. That would cause considerable damage to the Internet.
2. Exactly the problem with setting up alternate roots. Someone doing this would cause tremendous problems for absolutely everyone involved.
3. Yes, they definitely are.
4. The US relinquishing control might be good, or it might be bad. Right now it is run by various companies and there is only oversight. With it in the UN, now you have it being a potential political bargaining chip.
This move is very likely to fail miserably and demonstrate exactly why allowing an international *political* body to have anything to do with such things is bad. Right now *almost everyone* uses the ICANN delegated root servers. The liklihood of this changing because the UN or the EU says so is extremely low. No Internet users get any benefit out of doing this. Various countries get to try to force policy based on it.
If a change were made, it should be to insure that *no country* and *no political body* has control over DNS. This move exasperates the problem instead of fixing it.
Why can't the EU be happy with "eu.int"? They're an international organization, right? They are using it right now, so it certainly isn't an issue of not being able to get it. That would be appropriate, unlike making ".eu" for them. People complain about all the US interests in.com,.org, and.net, so why make it worse?
The "rule" that your talking about is spelled out in various RFCs that make up the standards for the DNS system.
Plus, questioning the reliability, etc, is most certainly NOT bs. The current system has been refined for decades, and everybody knows that it can be trusted to work. It has *proven* itself. Putting together a new system, no matter how good your connections and hardware and people, is putting together a system that has not proven itself.
The interoperability is *immediately* a problem. How will this proposed new system work with the existing infrastructure. How long will it take to reconfigure all those DNS servers to query your new root. How do you query both the new root and the old root if they decide not to cooperate? There is a myriad of problems with doing this, which is why it has never been successful.
That is interesting, but there are flaws... first is that no existing software will work with that. Second is that you now need to know what country your site is in. It is much easier to do it the way we do it now, and can be made a lot more robust.
(I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons that I didn't think of)
Look, your whole argument is bs. This comes down to China and the EU saying 'we want it' and the US saying 'um... no, this is ours and we don't want to just give it to you'. Right now DNS is actually run by various companies, with oversight by ICANN, which has oversight from the US government. DNS is an opt-in system, and everyone has opted in to the one we have. What we have going on here is a few politicians that don't understand tech, as evidenced by their repeated lack of understanding on the subject at every opportunity, that have decided to piss with the system. The Internet works without government control, and DNS works and runs without the US government managing it.
If you don't like it, then set up your own DNS. If you think DNS needs to be more decentrilized (which is kind of stupid to do), then write a set of protocols to do so. If people like it, they will use it. Just like how DNS started to be used.
Why in the hell do we need the UN trying to forcibly take control of anything? We have independant countries for very good reasons. The UN is not a lawmaking body, and the EU isn't supposed to be either. How does this have any basis in the foundings of these organizations?
No, this whole set of shenanigans perpetrated by the UN and the several countries is ridiculous, and just about the worst possible way of doing it.
That would be a result of the EU not being a country. ccTLD = *Country Code* Top Level Domain. They can use.uk,.fr,.de, etc, for their sites. I doubt very strongly that you would have people rapidly changing to the EU system, with its unproven reliability and unproven interoperability. I would say that people would likely rapidly switch to using the real root servers that the US oversees.
This doesn't spell the end to ICANN at all. All it does is reinforce the idea that the EU thinks they control the economic members and doesn't really respect member countries, and that the UN is powerless. People bitch and moan that the US tries to take things from other countries, well here is the exact same thing.
The stupid control apps thing depends on which drivers you're using. The current.NET based ATI drivers are really bad for that, but their previous applet was okay. I've never noticed the NVIDIA ones being bad in the same way. The one thing that commonly annoyed me with ATI was their screens were far larger than they needed, and in the wrong orientation, so I had issues configuring anything with the machine connected to my TV, which runs at 800x600. The NVIDIA ones took up more screen horizontally, so I didn't have that problem.
I'm actually rather surprised that you have trouble with NVIDIA drivers, especially on Windows. I used to have the same trouble with vc's that you describe, but I haven't had that on any of my machines that use the nvidia driver in quite a while. I'd say you must have a flakey component somewhere in there. Neither the ATI nor the NVIDIA drivers should be trashing your machine that way.
I agree that the open source drivers are quite a lot better for ATI than for NVIDIA. The nv driver is only any good for 2D. This is really a shame, but at least the video manufacturers have a decent reason for not open sourcing their drivers. I still don't like that they won't release programming specs for the hardware, though.
As I said before, I've always had problems with ATI. I couldn't run dual-tuners with my All-In-Wonder because the software refused to start. They apparently only check the primary video card, and since I had an AGP NVIDIA card and a PCI All-In-Wonder, this didn't work out so well. I had problems getting an X300 to work right with X, and even more problems getting it to go dual-head. I have a few servers with rage128's, and a few others with RageIIc's that ocasionally crash in the video driver. Even my first ATI card, a mach32, gave me tons of issues. ATI didn't do the card so that it could run with a 40MHz VLB slot, and AMD was selling quite a few CPUs that run the slots at that.
With NVIDIA, aside from the Linux vc problem, I always had good luck. Even my riva128 worked quite well, as did my TNT, GeForce2, and GeForce4. Laptops that have had Geforce2Go chips worked equally well for me.
Either way, seriously, ATI and NVIDIA both have good hardware. The only actual hardware problem I had with ATI was that mach32, and that isn't entirely ATIs fault; I think VLB was only spec'ed to 33MHz. Aside from that, any issue I've had with ATI has been software.
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One, the argument of national security had better not be a good reason. Nothing essential should be running on something like RIMs network. That would be dangerous and asinine. Now, it might be the case, but that needs to change, not have some ridiculous exemption that shouldn't be allowed.
Two, all laws should pertain to citizens. They are what the government serves, and that is all. If you start talking about corporations as somehow bigger than a citizen, you've already lost sight of the purpose of the government. It is to serve *the people*, not the corporations.
Three, most of the operations of the Federal government is in direct opposition to the Constitution. Why would this be any different? They ignore the majority of that document today, and this is just the latest example of the Federal doing whatever they please.
If that were the case, it would highlight an incredibly stupid group of people. Government should not rely on the private sector for critical infrastructure. Relying on RIM for emergency management notification is as foolish and amateur as relying on cell phone networks during a disaster.
There is no good reason to not shut of government use. At worst, it would get it into a few foolish people's heads that they shouldn't be doing things that way, and that they should use reliable methods of information dispersal. Having something be at the whims of a market driven private sector network for something of national security had better not only scary people, but get people fired.
Also, no, almost all uses of emminant domain are bad uses. It is wholly wrong for the government to just up and steal what you have legal rights to. If they want to fix what they've screwed up in patent law, then that is the right answer. Forcing this company to give up their property is not the right way.
First of all, copyright/patent law has been happening in the EU. If they got their way, they would've had a worse system than the US. That shows very badly for the future.
If you hadn't managed to notice, the EU is a socialist structure. That means that over time, more and more power will aggregate on the top. Then you are left with an incredibly powerful large government that can do what it wants, as all the citizens depend on it to live. Socialism is sort of guaranteed to fail, since it requires quite a few abridgments of freedom to function.
I might not agree with what happens in the US, but the constant babble about the EU being the height of government or something is ridiculous. The EU is, by default, a more restrictive setup than the US. It does not represent the citizens of the alliance, but the governments. It is not above corruption, as has been already seen. The EU is *not* any better than what the US has become.
You want to see the future of the EU? Visit the US, and then visit China. Now please knock off the bs until you go read more history and politics.
Surprisingly enough, it often does come down to money. Sure, the difference in price for 16MB vs 32MB isn't much when you're putting together a PC for yourself, but the difference of a few dollars is of major importance when you're doing mass market. Companies often make choices about knocking a few cents off the price of something by messing about with vendors.
Funny, but honestly, you know damn well that if that was the only condition for you getting the job, then the company is staffed by idiots. All that established is that you would probably use the right tool for the job.
You aren't going to write the fastest code possible if you don't bother to learn the quirks of the compiler. The same would be true of the run-time optimizations of Java. You won't write good code if you refuse to learn what you need to know.
No cell phone games written in Java do this. I can quite confidently state this, as Sun says it will take more than that just for the JRE. See any number of other comments around this post. Go read teh J2ME docs.
malloc and free can be pretty slow if you do it wrong. You can also write your program so that it isn't a performance issue. The same thing can be pretty slow in any language. No surprise that poor coding skills equal poor applications. You can also cherry-pick your apps to give you the numbers you want. PERL and GhostScript are interpreters; it is no surprise that they spend a lot of time doing memory management.
They could've also mentioned Java as a C application, but they didn't, because that would've defeated that point. Just because one app doesn't run well doesn't mean that all C apps will do the same.
See, that right there is a huge chunk of the whole problem. If programmers weren't being lazy and arrogant jerks and assuming that nobody cares about how poorly designed and coded their algorithms are, or how blatently horrible their memory usage is, we would have a lot fewer problems.
I don't care that Java will get there at some point, or that it's better now. I care about whether it actually works right, and right now it does not. It does have too long a startup, most of the UI toolkits are horribly slow, it does not follow native platform UI conventions, and it is just not as nice to use a Java app as it is an equally well written native app. It does take far too memory, especially compared to other languages. Even the cross-platform nature of the code is largely a lie. Different JREs don't support the same things, and many platforms lack a JRE. There are massive differences between the various editions of Java so as to make it useless to try to write something across them. Your Java app written against "Vendor X Version Y Edition Z JRE" should work fine on any other platform with the same version of "Vendor X Version Y Edition Z JRE". That's all you can safely say without a good amount more testing.
However, most of all, my CPU time and RAM might be cheap, but they are abused every time I use an application written in that mindset. I have memory needlessly abused, and CPU time needlessly wasted every time I run some poorly coded program. That means that I lose time and productivity every time I run your poorly written app. That attitude pisses me off, why we should all squander our system resources so that a few lazy programmers can write some app a little faster and with less effort, rather than doing their job right.
Programmer cycles are a lot cheaper than making thousands of people upgrade their hardware. I imagine those programmer cycles are a few orders of magnitude cheaper.
In the Dell servers that I've purchased since 2000, I have three different types of enclosures for drives. None of the systems came with additional enclosures, so you have to contact Dell and order more. The last time I tried ordering the older style enclosure (24xx series), I was informed by Dell that I would only be able to get refurbished versions of them. To make that even more annoying, you have to order the screws separately.
There isn't good reason to have different enclosures for SATA vs. SCSI. They do the same thing and having more common parts is better.
The rest of my post is easily proven by actually reading reviews or reading the Dell web site.
They were right there throwing a fit, just like when any tech advance happens that might threaten their model.
The Audio Home Recording Act was passed in response to the release of DAT, but it exempted formats that were primarily used for data or video. It forced royalties onto the recorders and blank media for products targetted at audio. As a result of the exemption for data, CD-Rs avoided this problem, since CD burners were targetted primarily for data use.
No, DAT mostly failed because of massive pressures from the various recording cartels. Something about perfect digital copies of content and not a good enough way of preventing everyone from being able to get another perfect copy. As a result, prices were forced to stay high, and nobody ever bought into it. I believe there was even a tax placed on DAT that made it more expensive.
OK, that is *soo* hard to work around. "Support is available between 8am and 6pm M-F, excluding major holidays." Then, for a large additional fee, you can offer them even better support, with more hours, and maybe onsite service.
This is what being in that market is all about. So nobody else should ever sell white-box systems with support, because Dell already does that? People never get ahead in the world with that kind of hefty lack of entreprenueral spirit.
#1- On a home desktop, gold support is the *only* available level of support. They call it gold to sucker people into thinking it's somehow special. All it does is get you off hold faster and confuse the support issue. The one that actually matters is "hardware support". Basically, you got screwed if your parts weren't *always* there the next business day. The base hardware support plan (the one that is included with any machine purchase) gives you a 3 year warranty with 3 year next business day on-site service. Unless you bought from the "home" store, which is a mistake, since Dimensions are crap. Hell, you must be since I don't think this "Gold support" thing is an option in any other store.
The only thing you accomplish by getting "gold technical support" is giving Dell another $70 for doing what they should be doing anyway. It is not a warranty in any way at all. Regardless, the "Home/Home Office" store is the wrong place to buy anything from.
#2- Dell uses several non-standard components that serve no purpose except to try to lock you into Dell. One good example is that they switch around a few pins on their ATX power supply. This means that you can't just up and use a different P/S or motherboard, or reuse either in another machine.
You obviously haven't seen too many parts from a Dell. They do annoying things like that all the time, like using different hot-swap drive enclosures on almost every model, leaving out cabling that would allow expansion (like by providing you with another power connector), or making their cases so that if you buy a device from someone else, your case looks like crap because you don't have the right stupid plastic face to put over the device.
Anyway, gold support really is trash and there are plenty of Dell parts that won't just work in another machine, and sometimes not in another Dell. A home user that is willing to buy a Dell Dimension is probably not into hardware enough to run into that.
This is the method that we all said we would prefer. I don't understand why people are all up in arms over this; would it be better if they were throwing lawsuits around instead of beating people at their own game? Really, I prefer this way anyway, and it has the fringe benefit of getting people get to try to design better protocols. This keeps sounds more and more preferable to lawsuits.
/Rome/ wasn't broadcast, so it doesn't count. HBO is a somewhat pricy subscription based cable TV network, so their content never hit the air in any form of open format. This is like throwing DVD rips up on a BT tracker and wondering why whoever bankrolled the movie is a little peeved.
Besides all of that, I really don't have a problem with people downloading broadcast TV shows. I honestly think the legal system shouldn't have a problem with it either, since it was broadcast and all. Now, the courts probably would take issue, seeing to how the industry bought so many wonderful laws. But that isn't the point.
The problem here is that
No, a derivative work is a work that is based upon a previous work. Random data, or part of a data stream that constitute the show, are not derivative works at all. Derivative works must be unique creations, too.
Yeah, the currency wasn't the best example. :)
I don't want to see DNS run by this level of politics. Even though governements are using it, it is basically a commercially funded and operated venture. It exists through private cooperation. I don't agree with the argument that the US should run it because it always has, but I don't agree that the US should have to give it up because the UN said so.
The only way that I would go along with a change is if it became a completely industry controlled system. If government is more heavily involved, it will not be any better.
As it stands, nobody has to use the existing root servers; that is voluntary. Putting it in the UN puts it under the whims of random, and potentially much more hostile, countries. It is just not the right place for this sort of thing.
Oh, I agree with you that the US government is out of control. I'm a proponent of federalism, which is quite opposite of what the US is doing now. I don't agree with Pres. Bush's policies, but I also don't agree with what the UN and co. are doing either. Right now DNS is actually run by various companies and such, and it is working fine. The US government does not exercise control over any of it. Now, if they started to try to influence the operation of DNS, then my opinion would change.
Right now, the way the UN is trying to do this is wrong. DNS is working the way it is. The UN doing what they are talking about would actually destabilise the whole system. If other countries are worried, they should be encouraging their businesses to host root servers. Then if the US starts pulling anything, these roots would already be in position to take the US influenced servers out of the loop.
I'm not argueing that the US isn't wrong, but that the UN *is* wrong. It is simply a poor way for them to try to do this. Having the UN in charge will make things much much worse. Look at the track record for UN commissions... If the US being having influence bothers you, then what of China, Libya, N. Korea, Iran, or so many others.
All of those things are voluntary coordination and cooperation between various companies, sometimes with the aid of treaty. For example, tariff, copyrights, and patents have to be done by government, but they are coordinated by asking countries to be involved voluntarily. Telephones, mail, and finance are handled by companies, cooperating voluntarily to further their business interests. Sometimes governments get involved in those things, but not always.
The EU did become a lawmaking body, of sorts, but the pretense under which it was formed was as an economic alliance. Even now, each country has to actually enact local laws that implement EU directive, and some choose not to. See England and their continued use of Pounds as primary currency, just for one example. Otherwise you would have provinces governed by the EU instead of seperate countries. Unfortunately, under that situation, Europe really would have finished turning in the modern US.
Anyway, my larger point is that most international issues of this type are handled by voluntary cooperation of private sector interests. There is no need for the UN to be involved.
No, you have it wrong right from the start. The US is not using force to do anything on the matter. The UN/EU/whoever is *attempting* to use force to take DNS for themselves. Got it yet? US="no force" and UN="force". The US is not using any force for this. The UN is saying "give that to us right now", and the US is just saying "no, we will not give it to you". This would be the same as if the US said "France, you will give us your trains" and France said "No, go to hell", and then the US whined to the UN, and the UN tried to tell France to give them their trains. This whole thing is bunk and it has been conducted in a childish and incorrect way.
Foreign countries can have all the concerns they want, but they do not control what the US does, just as the US does not control what Germany does. They cannot simple *tell* the US that they aren't allowed to run DNS anymore. Like has been said so many times, if they want to run their own DNS, there is nothing stopping them, but they have no way to *take it by force*, be it political or otherwise.
We don't let the UN run the telephone numbering system, or postal systems, or ANY COUNTRY'S INFRASTRUCTURE. This should be no different at all.
I am not socialist nor communist nor do I support a global government of any type, nor anything that looks like those three. They all heavily limit freedom. I also don't support the current way the government in the US is running things. I *definitely* don't support the UN attempting to do anything that isn't invited by the countr(y|ies) in question. You might feel the need to argue the point, but the idea of "one true world government" in fact requires limitation of freedom, and at the very least, it is socialism. It removes choice, and forces that if you disagree with the will of the government, your *only* course of action is revolution.
You don't seem to be able to comprehend that the *UN* actions are the use of force, and the *US* actions are a lack of force. The UN is attempting to *FORCE* the US to give up DNS. The US already has DNS, and simply has to not cede control.
However, back on topic, the only right way to change DNS is to remove government from it entirely. Giving it to the UN is making it worse.
1. Spoofing would be very bad, considering what that would do to the IP routing. They would have to spoof IP addresses on a multinational level, screwing with routing tables everywhere. That would cause considerable damage to the Internet.
2. Exactly the problem with setting up alternate roots. Someone doing this would cause tremendous problems for absolutely everyone involved.
3. Yes, they definitely are.
4. The US relinquishing control might be good, or it might be bad. Right now it is run by various companies and there is only oversight. With it in the UN, now you have it being a potential political bargaining chip.
This move is very likely to fail miserably and demonstrate exactly why allowing an international *political* body to have anything to do with such things is bad. Right now *almost everyone* uses the ICANN delegated root servers. The liklihood of this changing because the UN or the EU says so is extremely low. No Internet users get any benefit out of doing this. Various countries get to try to force policy based on it.
If a change were made, it should be to insure that *no country* and *no political body* has control over DNS. This move exasperates the problem instead of fixing it.
Why can't the EU be happy with "eu.int"? They're an international organization, right? They are using it right now, so it certainly isn't an issue of not being able to get it. That would be appropriate, unlike making ".eu" for them. People complain about all the US interests in .com, .org, and .net, so why make it worse?
The "rule" that your talking about is spelled out in various RFCs that make up the standards for the DNS system.
Plus, questioning the reliability, etc, is most certainly NOT bs. The current system has been refined for decades, and everybody knows that it can be trusted to work. It has *proven* itself. Putting together a new system, no matter how good your connections and hardware and people, is putting together a system that has not proven itself.
The interoperability is *immediately* a problem. How will this proposed new system work with the existing infrastructure. How long will it take to reconfigure all those DNS servers to query your new root. How do you query both the new root and the old root if they decide not to cooperate? There is a myriad of problems with doing this, which is why it has never been successful.
That is interesting, but there are flaws... first is that no existing software will work with that. Second is that you now need to know what country your site is in. It is much easier to do it the way we do it now, and can be made a lot more robust.
(I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons that I didn't think of)
Look, your whole argument is bs. This comes down to China and the EU saying 'we want it' and the US saying 'um... no, this is ours and we don't want to just give it to you'. Right now DNS is actually run by various companies, with oversight by ICANN, which has oversight from the US government. DNS is an opt-in system, and everyone has opted in to the one we have. What we have going on here is a few politicians that don't understand tech, as evidenced by their repeated lack of understanding on the subject at every opportunity, that have decided to piss with the system. The Internet works without government control, and DNS works and runs without the US government managing it.
If you don't like it, then set up your own DNS. If you think DNS needs to be more decentrilized (which is kind of stupid to do), then write a set of protocols to do so. If people like it, they will use it. Just like how DNS started to be used.
Why in the hell do we need the UN trying to forcibly take control of anything? We have independant countries for very good reasons. The UN is not a lawmaking body, and the EU isn't supposed to be either. How does this have any basis in the foundings of these organizations?
No, this whole set of shenanigans perpetrated by the UN and the several countries is ridiculous, and just about the worst possible way of doing it.
That would be a result of the EU not being a country. ccTLD = *Country Code* Top Level Domain. They can use .uk, .fr, .de, etc, for their sites. I doubt very strongly that you would have people rapidly changing to the EU system, with its unproven reliability and unproven interoperability. I would say that people would likely rapidly switch to using the real root servers that the US oversees.
This doesn't spell the end to ICANN at all. All it does is reinforce the idea that the EU thinks they control the economic members and doesn't really respect member countries, and that the UN is powerless. People bitch and moan that the US tries to take things from other countries, well here is the exact same thing.
The stupid control apps thing depends on which drivers you're using. The current .NET based ATI drivers are really bad for that, but their previous applet was okay. I've never noticed the NVIDIA ones being bad in the same way. The one thing that commonly annoyed me with ATI was their screens were far larger than they needed, and in the wrong orientation, so I had issues configuring anything with the machine connected to my TV, which runs at 800x600. The NVIDIA ones took up more screen horizontally, so I didn't have that problem.
I'm actually rather surprised that you have trouble with NVIDIA drivers, especially on Windows. I used to have the same trouble with vc's that you describe, but I haven't had that on any of my machines that use the nvidia driver in quite a while. I'd say you must have a flakey component somewhere in there. Neither the ATI nor the NVIDIA drivers should be trashing your machine that way.
I agree that the open source drivers are quite a lot better for ATI than for NVIDIA. The nv driver is only any good for 2D. This is really a shame, but at least the video manufacturers have a decent reason for not open sourcing their drivers. I still don't like that they won't release programming specs for the hardware, though.
As I said before, I've always had problems with ATI. I couldn't run dual-tuners with my All-In-Wonder because the software refused to start. They apparently only check the primary video card, and since I had an AGP NVIDIA card and a PCI All-In-Wonder, this didn't work out so well. I had problems getting an X300 to work right with X, and even more problems getting it to go dual-head. I have a few servers with rage128's, and a few others with RageIIc's that ocasionally crash in the video driver. Even my first ATI card, a mach32, gave me tons of issues. ATI didn't do the card so that it could run with a 40MHz VLB slot, and AMD was selling quite a few CPUs that run the slots at that.
With NVIDIA, aside from the Linux vc problem, I always had good luck. Even my riva128 worked quite well, as did my TNT, GeForce2, and GeForce4. Laptops that have had Geforce2Go chips worked equally well for me.
Either way, seriously, ATI and NVIDIA both have good hardware. The only actual hardware problem I had with ATI was that mach32, and that isn't entirely ATIs fault; I think VLB was only spec'ed to 33MHz. Aside from that, any issue I've had with ATI has been software.