um... governments set prices for a lot of things, in a lot of places, at a lot of times. North Korea's a basket case in so many different ways that it is hardly a representative of much of anything.
In Canada, the government regulates the phone industry, and hydro power, and our hydro power is way cheaper than in the US. One can legislate prices in a number of ways. Crude oil is the same price the world over, but gas costs about 6$ a gallon in Europe, and about 3$ in Canada because of taxes. The gas mileage of european cars, on average, is much higher than that of cars in America, and they also produce less emissions. That is price fixing that does some good for the planet and the folks who have to live in those cities.
US government fixes prices of wheat for export because of "unfair" competition from... well, mostly Canada and Argentina (oh the horror...). Europeans to the same for a lot of agricultural produce. I think that those are examples of where it doesn't help much. They would have helped you a lot more than North Korea.
What about rationing in war-time in such dictatorial backward places like the UK? It would be better to ruin everyone by having food stuffs quadruple in cost, making sure that the poorer classes go undernourished and thrilled to be cannon fodder?
The key to deciding whether something is a monopoly is to evaluate switching cost. If that cost is close to nil, as it is in the case with Google, or you can avoid dealing with them entirely (I've never dealt with IBM Global Services in 20 years in the business, hasn't cramped my style.) then it isn't a monopoly.
If in order to change phone companies you have to pay for someone to run a cable from the next town... you have a high switching cost. If changing office software vendors means none of your peer organizations being able to read the documents you send them, you have a high switching cost.
I don't think Cisco is a monopoly, even though they probably have a 90% share in the enterprise market. There are lots of competitors hanging around, and you can deal with the competitors without too much pain because of standards compliance.
Market share does not define a monopoly. Switching cost does. I challenge you to find an unregulated monopoly held by a private corporation that ever acted responsibly. They didn't call them 'Robber Barons' in the gilded age for nothing. Look at Carnegie and Steel production in the 19th century. A company is around to make money, the only thing which stops a company from raising prices is competition. If, for whatever reason, there is no competition, prices will rise without bound, sure as the sun will rise in the east.
I agree that the whole voucher business is probably going to be a loser. I would rather go the same route as a handful of countries have done, in simply mandating that, for government use, all software should be open source. Where no existing software for a purpose exists, it will be upto government to get it built as open source, either inhouse, or by contract, or whatever.
Governments run garages for fleets of trucks and buses, nobody accuses them of trying to put GM-Goodwrench out of business. Nobody claims that it is odd for them to be using buses, when everyone else has cars. Government has supply offices, but Staples is still in business. Governments do lots of things, strictly for their own needs (to permit them to provide services), that have an effect on the wider economy. This would be a gentler way of breaking what is primarily the network effect of Office.
There ain't no justification, because it is widely aknowledged as fact by anyone with a passing knowledge of the subject matter..
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_marketA free market is one in which buyers and sellers make mutually voluntary exchanges at a price agreed upon by both... many assert that government intervention is necessary to remedy market failure that is held be an inevitable result of absolute adherence to free market principles...
My assertion is that when there are too few sellers it leads to market failure. This is a banal statement that doesn't really need defense, but here you go anyways.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Failure In economics, market failure is a situation in which markets do not efficiently organize production or allocate goods and services to consumers (for example, a failure to allocate goods in a way some see as socially or morally preferable). To economists, the term would normally be applied to situations where the inefficiency is particularly dramatic, or when it is suggested that non-market institutions would provide a more desirable result. On the other hand, to many, market failures are situations where market forces do not serve the perceived "public interest". Here, the focus is on the economists' theories of market failure.
It's weird, you know... government organizations whose stated goal is innovation often have a hard time. But government funding of research in general... well everybody knows about ARPAnet... and the DARPA grand challenge robot races had me enthralled. That's good stuff. Most of the early linux drivers came from Donald Becker while working at a government lab. Once he had a name for himself, he started upSkyld. This guy named Tim Berners-Lee worked out a wonky protocol and his employer, not just a government lab, but WORSE, a lab built from a multi-national collaboration (the european centre for nuclear research... a physics research lab.) This guy in a National Centre for Supercomputer Applications, a government lab in Illinois, named Marc Andreeson, picked it up and made a better version, that was released as NCSA Mosaic, which begat netscape, and IE.
I live in Québec, we export electricity to the US northeast, and people here pay about 5 us cents/ kw. It is government run and profitable. On the other hand, Bell Canada is a private corporation, and residential phone service is, frankly, a ripoff. Their internet service is dumbed down with port blocking and they want to do traffic discrimination (ie. kill voip.) These are all legitimate approaches for a private sector company to take, but they do absolutely no good for the consumer. You can take your money to the cable company... tweedledum, meet tweedledee.
Luckily enough, regulator still impose open access provisions for now, and I still can choose smaller companies which arent treating all their clients as idiot children, but it is a very fragile thing (look at how open access has been killed in the US.) Competition from government run/helped ISPs like municipal water systems would, imho, a good thing for societies.
Our post office, Canada Post, is government owned, profitable, and well-liked. Québec also has a government corporation with a monopoly on gambling (runs casinos and lotteries.) I consider such activities as a stupidity tax, and far prefer for the government to take in this money, and use it to provide services, including treatment for the victims of this undesirable activity, rather a private corporation that would be bound and determined (and rightly so) to hook as much of the population as possible.
So I dont buy the archetypal conservative line that anything a government does is going to suck. Reality is a lot more complicated than ideologies.
It is precisely in those sorts of situations, where the market situation leads to natural monopolies, and consequent high prices, that the government should look closely at what is going on, and figure out how to shake things up such that competition will again become healthy. Failing that, if no competition for a given niche can exist, the next two choices are regulation (like the telco's) or creating 'competition' like the suggested 'software corps.'
The premise of a free economy is always being able to take your money to a competitor. This fundamental does not hold in cases of A corporate monopoly or even duopoly (cable & telco internet access), Extremely limited choices, in and of itself, are always bad for the public, and bad for the economy. That is why power, water, cable and telco companies are either regulated today or outright run by the government. A good argument could be made for regulating Microsoft (the goverment would have to approve the price of windows, and they would have to justify increases, and demonstrate their costs to a government board.)
Rather than spending money on legislators, spending money on development, fostering open source via an express government preference will probably provide all the help open source needs to break the MS network effect, and therefore the monopoly, restoring the market to a healthy state. Once there are competitors in a market, the government actors should step back.
There are lots of issues that are like that, like Consumer Electronics should drop all the cheap protocols and go wireless. check out the last post here: http://stuffdreams.blogspot.com/
http://www.terrascale.com/prod_e.html
Run a client on linux boxes with user-mode drivers that provide a logical abstraction for a whole network of backend linux boxes over any networking transport you want.
I get the idea but... post-docs are usually worse than children. They download anything, don't give a darn about security, and are knowledgeable and proud enough to do real damage.:-)
cpu offloading makes sense if you have enough IO bus capacity to drive many cards. With PCI, you can saturate one gige network, and half of another. In a supercomputer from a few years ago, they used to use two slot PCI buses (had dozens of buses.) That would be a great place of TCP offloading, but most people arent going to notice.
You need for the IO-bus to be vastly (say 10x or 100x) faster than the networking bus for it to be worthwhile, say to use SCSI-over-IP and get several Gbytes/second in real throughput over multiple channels. Commodity servers are stuck with a couple of hundred megabytes per bus, which cpus can handle. There isnt any point to scale to.
Worse, Infiniband is going to make inside and outside buses, networking and storage technologies, go pretty much at the same speed.
Gripes about ext3 performance are probably outdated.
We did some tests comparing reiser3, xfs, and ext3 with the dir_index option on 2.6 kernels.
We were writing thousands (ok tens of thousands) of small files into a couple of directories (specialized app, you don't want to know.)
When directories got large, ext3 with the hash lookups (between 800 and 1500 creations per second on newish hardware) ran much faster than xfs, oh and several orders of magnitude faster than ext3 without the directory hashing. reiser3 was slower than xfs.
We were thinking of going with xfs anyways, because it was so attractive that the
directories would shrink when files were deleted (whereas ext3 directories stay big, with a hole in it.) but xfs would crash on us after a couple of days. So In March we chose ext3. We have approximately 9 million files in a single file system at the moment, it seems to work ok, but the system crashes every three weeks or so. We think we might have tortured it too much, and can reasonably keep only about 2 million files on-line, so we'll see if that helps.
Ever heard of poetic license? It was just phrased in such a way to grab attention, not piss people off. The DoS'ers (all one or two of them should they exist) are culpable and should feel as such.
The part that was addressed to all slashdotters was not to show any support to anyone who would engage in DoS attacks. If we stand by and say "They deserve it, get 'em!", we are culpable as a group.
It is not patronizing to assume an american footbal fan would watch the superbowl. It is not patronizing to assume a FOSS freak who launches a DoS attack would read a slashdot thread about his target.
On any open platform, you put in a little library between the GUI and the security layer. It reproduces the nice clean api, passes credentials down, and content up, copying it off to another device, un-encrypted, on the way.
The only reason you can run linux on proprietary hardware is because it isn't illegal to reverse engineer it. The DMCA coupled with the coming trusted computing platform architecture "fixes" that.
One kid does a DoS attack and you call the whole free software community terrorists?....
I may not agree with the children who throw tantrums and DoS businesses they don't like,
We agree. You've restated what I was trying to get across. That FOSS people, 99% of them, do not support DoS attacks and the like, but the other 1% give the rest of us (I am including myself in that group) a bad name.
Maybe it didn't come across that way, but it was meant to address directly to the one kid. I would have thought people who did not do it would understand that I didn't mean them. Apparently not.
Second, terrorism, wars and arsen kill, injure and put people in real physical danger. Hacking and DoS attacks do not. And hacking is very different than DoS. Hacking involves breaking into computers. DoS simply refuses those computers network bandwidth.
So you are saying that property damage is no big deal. so if you make sure everyone is out of the building before you burn down a printing press makes it OK. If these DoS attacks are for real, then they are costing this company real money. How about uttering a death threat over the phone... doesn't actually hurt anyone... sound OK? How about just putting a burning cross on the front lawn? breaking a few windows (google cristalnacht.) Nobody 'got hurt' in any of those events, so they're OK, right?
I respectfully disagree completely with your reasoning.
Regardless of whether it is right or wrong,
An arab guy named... oh.. Shaheed (very common name, unfortunately, it happens to mean 'Martyr') walks in for a job interview. You are telling me that thoughts of terrorists are not going to cross your mind?
I don't want the term FOSS even vaguely associated with nasty hackers. Look what happenned to the word 'hacker.' You cannot really use it any more. I would like to be able to promote free and open source software without people worrying that I am an utter nutbar.
You think that what some random kid does doesn't matter. I think that when they do it in the name of FOSS, it does matter. I don't like it when people supposedly on our side are handing the other-side ammunition.
These people are about as useful to FOSS advocacy as Lyndon Larouche is to the US democratic party. ( http://larouchein2004.net/...
http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/ ) The 'one kid who does a DOS attack' stands in complete opposition to the values of open source: open discussion and cooperation, reliance on facts rather than marketing or legal constraint, meritocracy.
I certainly wouldn't feel any sympathy for LinuxWorld after reading their unethical propaganda.
Agreed. I don't have any sympathy for them. We need to keep the focus on their unethical behaviour, not create a side-show where they can garner sympathy and deflect the issue by giving them the opportunity to characterise us as nut cases.
Free speech is not about letting people you agree with say their piece. It is about letting people you violently disagree with say theirs.
I'll admit to being clueless... why is saying such a thing bad... some possibilities?
it is OK to DoS people we don't like.
There is no DoS Attack, so I am being duped by the bad people and spreading FUD.
It is wrong to assume that someone here is responsible
To 1... Well that is what my post meant. It is bad to DoS people, especially if you disagree with them. If that's controversial, then my post is even more on target than I thought.
To 2. I don't know whether they had a DoS attack or not. Some people report they did, some say no. Saying it definitely is not happening is a bit unreasonable given that a lot of people (not just Laura Didio and Darl) have complained of such things after doing things considered offensive to FOSS, so it strains credibility that they are all lying or deeply misled.
To 3. Let's see, slashdot has an audience in the millions, it is a free software advocacy site, there are reports of DoS attacks agains anti-FOSS web sites. It is pretty near 100% probability that, if anyone is launching a DOS attack, they read this site.
The only way I can understand that this is a troll is if it is un-acceptable to state that some FOSS advocates are over the top. your mod points are proving my point, folks.
A very small proportion of FOSS supporters who engage in harassment both real and cyber nature, just like 99.whatever% of muslims are not terrorists. The tiny fraction will have an influence because they engage in un-acceptable behaviour.
It may or may not be true in this case, but you have to admit that it would not be very surprising if it was, as it
is a consistent complaint of media people that when a story critical of FOSS is published, they get, almost literally, tarred and feathered. Now you are going to say that those are all 'bad' people. Sure, they are on the other side, but there is ample evidence that folks have indeed DDoS'd SCO, and phone Darl to utter death threats, and the like. This is a recurring theme. I find it hard to believe they are all making it up. It isn't credible. You don't like what he is doing? Agreed, neither do I.
Disagreement is fine, pointing out that columnists are clueless by pointing to fallacies and inconsistencies or logical errors is perfectly fair game. Comparing source code to demonstrate a lack of copyright infringement is absolutely fabulous. Abuse, making death threats and DDoS attack, as the SCO folks, Laura Didio, and countless others have complained of, does not help us.. The probability that
someone who reads this site is responsible for those things pretty darn close to 1. So asking them to stop it, is perhaps patronizing for 999,999 people out of a million. How do you get to the 1 ?
I am neither an astroturfer, nor a troll. That my comment was modded as such is a very, very, mild version of the same logic. folks say something you don't like: call them a troll.
As for trying to influence people... ummm... I had some vague impression that slashdot is an open source advocacy site. Isn't the whole point to influence people? If people are hurting the cause by very poor forms of advocacy, it is our job to call them on it. They they won't come out into the open and take responsibility for their actions, so no other means are available.
Sure, optimize single node performance first, but keep in mind that horizontal scaling is something to look for. Put N machines behind a load balancer, ingest gets scattered among 'n' machines, queries go to all simultaneously. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases:-)
Linux Virtual Server in front of several instances of your windows box will do, with some proxying stuff for queries. Probably cheaper than spending months trying to tweak single node to get to your scaling target, and will scale trivially much farther out.
Folks, DoS attacks are wrong. It's the cyber equivalent of burning a newspaper down.
It gives the people (even if they are in the wrong) a victim status, plenty of sympathy from those who don't know about the issues, and shifts to debate to a place where you can't win.
A DoS attack cannot be morally supported. If there is hate speech, or a breach of moral codes, then the way to address it is as the linuxworld editors have done, by resignation, or by legal means. IOW, you answer speech with more speech and lawful action.
Hacking is the cyber equivalent of physical war. Anonymous DoS attacks are cyber-terrorism. Someone says something you don't like, so you burn down their business.
FOSS people need to help victims identify their attackers and assist, by any reasonable means available,
the identification and prosecution of those responsible. Any other action just allows others to tar us all with the same brush.
In terms of debate, and the view of independant third parties, you are just handing sympathy and support to the other side. Stop it.
The author has to agree to license their work
on 'terms acceptable to Microsoft'.
Free software and Creative Commons people really care about copyright. They do not want corporations ripping them off by bottling their thoughts like Perrier.
It would be quite interesting if the winner were to insist on the GPL, or (more appropriately, creative commons license) It would be an opportunity for a rapprochement between the proprietary world and the FOSS/CC world.
Would MS accept? Would that be an explicit endorsement of those licensing terms?
This is much like the MS aids conundrum. Should MS support generic drugs in the fight against aids? I do not know their position on this issue, but it would be interesting to hear. They are really stepping up to the plate on AIDS, but if the money ends up being just funnelled to multi-national pharmaceutical interests, that would not save nearly as many people, and has the potential for a PR backlash.
On the other hand, if they endorse the production of knock-offs in the developing world, aren't they undermining their whole anti-piracy thrust? I do not envy them the choice.
It is certainly told from an exclusively personal computing perspective. There was a lot of activity in the workstation market at the time, and most of those companies were in the valley, and were likely talking to each other. It only has a screenshot of kde, completely misses all the innovations of X (aside from mentioning separation of mechanism from policy, which is very important.)
device independence. You could fire off GUI applications from a sun workstation on an SGI or an HP, and the window would show up.... http://www.x.org/X11_xdesign.html
X-Terminals do not exist in the PC world. They were a cost effective technology to bring bigger displays and simpler management of workstations in the 90's.
The use of window managers and GUI toolkits meant that there was a playing field to implement all sorts of GUIs and there were.
Motif toolkit + mwm
twm as a non-proprietary simple sample window manager.
Sun! their original toolkits, with GUI APIs, bitmapped displays, and windows. (what was it called?)
SGI (first display postscript driven windowing system.) I cannot recall the name...
Apollo (only seen it on one station for a year or two, was quite different.)
HP had their own motif fork...
Sun NeWS.
HP & Dec converged stuff to create... OSF/Motif.
CDE came out...
and much more... You could see what PC OS's should do back in the early 90's but what the PC's didn't because the hardware of the time wasn't upto it.
Look at what someone gets in the US. If you are able to work, they cut you off completely in many US jurisdictions, or force you to work at jobs in order to earn their welfare. If you are part of the working poor, you are eating your KD in the states, and you get sick, what happens? You lose everything paying medical bills, and once you are poor enough, the state will take care of you.
In Canada, getting sick isnt a sentence of poverty. There is a safety net. Social entitlements like health care, and welfare are, by far, the biggest ticket items in government budgets. In the US? Defense. Canada isnt heaven, but compared to the US, we do a far better job of taking care of our own, because doing so is considered a societal priority.
Im not going to defend Mike Harris. Im not trying to promote or defend any cuts to the social safety net, but simply contrasting it with the US one, which I think it is safe to say, is inferior to what we have here.
If youre saying that our welfare program isnt enough to live on, well, OK, but it is already the biggest program in the government, in terms of budget, next to servicing the debt which was built by.... social spending we could not afford... At least we did not do it by invading St-Pierre & Miquelon. I think folks who advocate tax cuts are completely irresponsible, but so are those who want to set standards based on needs without regard to what the tax base lets us pay for. The last generation paid for welfare by saddling us with 30 billion in debt servicing per year. Lets not leave an even heavier burden for our children.
The only way to improve benefits is to either raise taxes or pay off the debt. Were stuck. Well do what we can, but youre right, there wont be a chicken in every pot.
I dont know if BT was more like a European PTT mandated monopoly, or more like a independant company with a defacto monopoly like in North america. In North America, the phone
companies own the COs. So the word deregulated means nobody messes with the phone companies, and they can do whatever they want (ie. do not allow any third parties access to their networks, competitors would have to build an entirely separate network.) The US is highly de-regulated, in their own understanding of the term. For example, the Cable companies explicitly fight not to be considered a telecom carrier, because that is more heavily regulated. In the US, DSL is open to third parties, but cable is not.
In Canada, the same forces you describe in the UK are at work, but they come about because of intense regulation of organizations that control the last mile, to encourage them to share. Hence third party ISPs can obtain wholesale access to DSL and cable networks. I havent heard of any access at the local loop level yet.
ya ever heard of the underground railroad ? Slaves
would escape from the south, and... where do you
think they went? Do you
think they all went back to the US after the civil war?
Do you know that the majority of the population of
both Vancouver and Toronto is non-white ? That
In Canada, the splashy news reports that come out
once in a while are about asian gangs, not blacks?
That our biggest crime problem / drug dealers are biker gangs, and they seem to be mostly white? That in Europe, the slums are mostly arab and gypsy, depending on the country...
Looking at it another way... Why the heck do you have
blacks in slums? Id say it is because the US public education
and social safety net has so many holes that folks in the
inner city are completely written off and have very little chance to get out, generation after generation. In other words, you are proving my thesis. Society doesnt give a shit, so there are slums.
Dont tell anyone, but 1.609 foreign kilometers are hiding inside every good old American Mile. Like everything else the foreign versions are smaller. Worse, I hear they come from France! I guess youll have to call them
Freedometers then.
Slashdot Mirror
um... governments set prices for a lot of things, in a lot of places, at a lot of times. North Korea's a basket case in so many different ways that it is hardly a representative of much of anything.
In Canada, the government regulates the phone industry, and hydro power, and our hydro power is way cheaper than in the US. One can legislate prices in a number of ways. Crude oil is the same price the world over, but gas costs about 6$ a gallon in Europe, and about 3$ in Canada because of taxes. The gas mileage of european cars, on average, is much higher than that of cars in America, and they also produce less emissions. That is price fixing that does some good for the planet and the folks who have to live in those cities.
US government fixes prices of wheat for export because of "unfair" competition from... well, mostly Canada and Argentina (oh the horror...). Europeans to the same for a lot of agricultural produce. I think that those are examples of where it doesn't help much. They would have helped you a lot more than North Korea.
What about rationing in war-time in such dictatorial backward places like the UK? It would be better to ruin everyone by having food stuffs quadruple in cost, making sure that the poorer classes go undernourished and thrilled to be cannon fodder?
The key to deciding whether something is a monopoly is to evaluate switching cost. If that cost is close to nil, as it is in the case with Google, or you can avoid dealing with them entirely (I've never dealt with IBM Global Services in 20 years in the business, hasn't cramped my style.) then it isn't a monopoly.
If in order to change phone companies you have to pay for someone to run a cable from the next town... you have a high switching cost. If changing office software vendors means none of your peer organizations being able to read the documents you send them, you have a high switching cost.
I don't think Cisco is a monopoly, even though they probably have a 90% share in the enterprise market. There are lots of competitors hanging around, and you can deal with the competitors without too much pain because of standards compliance.
Market share does not define a monopoly. Switching cost does. I challenge you to find an unregulated monopoly held by a private corporation that ever acted responsibly. They didn't call them 'Robber Barons' in the gilded age for nothing. Look at Carnegie and Steel production in the 19th century. A company is around to make money, the only thing which stops a company from raising prices is competition. If, for whatever reason, there is no competition, prices will rise without bound, sure as the sun will rise in the east.
I agree that the whole voucher business is probably going to be a loser. I would rather go the same route as a handful of countries have done, in simply mandating that, for government use, all software should be open source. Where no existing software for a purpose exists, it will be upto government to get it built as open source, either inhouse, or by contract, or whatever.
Governments run garages for fleets of trucks and buses, nobody accuses them of trying to put GM-Goodwrench out of business. Nobody claims that it is odd for them to be using buses, when everyone else has cars. Government has supply offices, but Staples is still in business. Governments do lots of things, strictly for their own needs (to permit them to provide services), that have an effect on the wider economy. This would be a gentler way of breaking what is primarily the network effect of Office.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market A free market is one in which buyers and sellers make mutually voluntary exchanges at a price agreed upon by both ... many assert that government intervention is necessary to remedy market failure that is held be an inevitable result of absolute adherence to free market principles...
My assertion is that when there are too few sellers it leads to market failure. This is a banal statement that doesn't really need defense, but here you go anyways.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Failure In economics, market failure is a situation in which markets do not efficiently organize production or allocate goods and services to consumers (for example, a failure to allocate goods in a way some see as socially or morally preferable). To economists, the term would normally be applied to situations where the inefficiency is particularly dramatic, or when it is suggested that non-market institutions would provide a more desirable result. On the other hand, to many, market failures are situations where market forces do not serve the perceived "public interest". Here, the focus is on the economists' theories of market failure.
It's weird, you know... government organizations whose stated goal is innovation often have a hard time. But government funding of research in general... well everybody knows about ARPAnet... and the DARPA grand challenge robot races had me enthralled. That's good stuff. Most of the early linux drivers came from Donald Becker while working at a government lab. Once he had a name for himself, he started upSkyld. This guy named Tim Berners-Lee worked out a wonky protocol and his employer, not just a government lab, but WORSE, a lab built from a multi-national collaboration (the european centre for nuclear research... a physics research lab.) This guy in a National Centre for Supercomputer Applications, a government lab in Illinois, named Marc Andreeson, picked it up and made a better version, that was released as NCSA Mosaic, which begat netscape, and IE.
I live in Québec, we export electricity to the US northeast, and people here pay about 5 us cents/ kw. It is government run and profitable. On the other hand, Bell Canada is a private corporation, and residential phone service is, frankly, a ripoff. Their internet service is dumbed down with port blocking and they want to do traffic discrimination (ie. kill voip.) These are all legitimate approaches for a private sector company to take, but they do absolutely no good for the consumer. You can take your money to the cable company... tweedledum, meet tweedledee.
Luckily enough, regulator still impose open access provisions for now, and I still can choose smaller companies which arent treating all their clients as idiot children, but it is a very fragile thing (look at how open access has been killed in the US.) Competition from government run/helped ISPs like municipal water systems would, imho, a good thing for societies.
Our post office, Canada Post, is government owned, profitable, and well-liked. Québec also has a government corporation with a monopoly on gambling (runs casinos and lotteries.) I consider such activities as a stupidity tax, and far prefer for the government to take in this money, and use it to provide services, including treatment for the victims of this undesirable activity, rather a private corporation that would be bound and determined (and rightly so) to hook as much of the population as possible.
So I dont buy the archetypal conservative line that anything a government does is going to suck. Reality is a lot more complicated than ideologies.
It is precisely in those sorts of situations, where the market situation leads to natural monopolies, and consequent high prices, that the government should look closely at what is going on, and figure out how to shake things up such that competition will again become healthy. Failing that, if no competition for a given niche can exist, the next two choices are regulation (like the telco's) or creating 'competition' like the suggested 'software corps.'
The premise of a free economy is always being able to take your money to a competitor. This fundamental does not hold in cases of A corporate monopoly or even duopoly (cable & telco internet access), Extremely limited choices, in and of itself, are always bad for the public, and bad for the economy. That is why power, water, cable and telco companies are either regulated today or outright run by the government. A good argument could be made for regulating Microsoft (the goverment would have to approve the price of windows, and they would have to justify increases, and demonstrate their costs to a government board.)
Rather than spending money on legislators, spending money on development, fostering open source via an express government preference will probably provide all the help open source needs to break the MS network effect, and therefore the monopoly, restoring the market to a healthy state. Once there are competitors in a market, the government actors should step back.
There are lots of issues that are like that, like Consumer Electronics should drop all the
cheap protocols and go wireless. check out the last post here: http://stuffdreams.blogspot.com/
http://www.terrascale.com/prod_e.html Run a client on linux boxes with user-mode drivers that provide a logical abstraction for a whole network of backend linux boxes over any networking transport you want.
I get the idea but... post-docs are usually worse than children. :-)
They download anything, don't give a darn about security, and are knowledgeable and proud enough to do real damage.
Never Seen one!
Where can you get a turn-table that can play one of those? (standard albums are around 30 cm.)
cpu offloading makes sense if you have enough IO bus
capacity to drive many cards. With PCI, you can saturate one gige network, and half of another. In a supercomputer from a few years ago, they used to use two slot PCI buses (had dozens of buses.) That would be a great place of TCP offloading, but most people arent going to notice.
You need for the IO-bus to be vastly (say 10x or 100x) faster than the networking bus for it to be worthwhile, say to use SCSI-over-IP and get several Gbytes/second in real throughput over multiple channels. Commodity servers are stuck with a couple of hundred megabytes per bus, which cpus can handle. There isnt any point to scale to.
Worse, Infiniband is going to make inside and outside buses, networking and storage technologies, go pretty much at the same speed.
We did some tests comparing reiser3, xfs, and ext3 with the dir_index option on 2.6 kernels. We were writing thousands (ok tens of thousands) of small files into a couple of directories (specialized app, you don't want to know.)
When directories got large, ext3 with the hash lookups (between 800 and 1500 creations per second on newish hardware) ran much faster than xfs, oh and several orders of magnitude faster than ext3 without the directory hashing. reiser3 was slower than xfs.
We were thinking of going with xfs anyways, because it was so attractive that the directories would shrink when files were deleted (whereas ext3 directories stay big, with a hole in it.) but xfs would crash on us after a couple of days. So In March we chose ext3. We have approximately 9 million files in a single file system at the moment, it seems to work ok, but the system crashes every three weeks or so. We think we might have tortured it too much, and can reasonably keep only about 2 million files on-line, so we'll see if that helps.
of course, ymmv.
The part that was addressed to all slashdotters was not to show any support to anyone who would engage in DoS attacks. If we stand by and say "They deserve it, get 'em!", we are culpable as a group.
It is not patronizing to assume an american footbal fan would watch the superbowl. It is not patronizing to assume a FOSS freak who launches a DoS attack would read a slashdot thread about his target.
just means you need more or bigger bodies, like the matrix. Otoh... How about the village cow or Elephant for laptop power?
The only reason you can run linux on proprietary hardware is because it isn't illegal to reverse engineer it. The DMCA coupled with the coming trusted computing platform architecture "fixes" that.
We agree. You've restated what I was trying to get across. That FOSS people, 99% of them, do not support DoS attacks and the like, but the other 1% give the rest of us (I am including myself in that group) a bad name.
Maybe it didn't come across that way, but it was meant to address directly to the one kid. I would have thought people who did not do it would understand that I didn't mean them. Apparently not.
as to use of the term cyber... somebody tell wikipedia, because they've got it wrong here: Cyber is a prefix stemming from cybernetics and loosely meaning through the use of a computer. See Cyberspace, Cybersex. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber ) , here, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-terrorism ), here, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace ) here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking ) and... well you get the picture.
Second, terrorism, wars and arsen kill, injure and put people in real physical danger. Hacking and DoS attacks do not. And hacking is very different than DoS. Hacking involves breaking into computers. DoS simply refuses those computers network bandwidth.
So you are saying that property damage is no big deal. so if you make sure everyone is out of the building before you burn down a printing press makes it OK. If these DoS attacks are for real, then they are costing this company real money. How about uttering a death threat over the phone... doesn't actually hurt anyone... sound OK? How about just putting a burning cross on the front lawn? breaking a few windows (google cristalnacht.) Nobody 'got hurt' in any of those events, so they're OK, right? I respectfully disagree completely with your reasoning.
Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, An arab guy named... oh.. Shaheed (very common name, unfortunately, it happens to mean 'Martyr') walks in for a job interview. You are telling me that thoughts of terrorists are not going to cross your mind? I don't want the term FOSS even vaguely associated with nasty hackers. Look what happenned to the word 'hacker.' You cannot really use it any more. I would like to be able to promote free and open source software without people worrying that I am an utter nutbar. You think that what some random kid does doesn't matter. I think that when they do it in the name of FOSS, it does matter. I don't like it when people supposedly on our side are handing the other-side ammunition.
These people are about as useful to FOSS advocacy as Lyndon Larouche is to the US democratic party. ( http://larouchein2004.net/ ...
http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/ ) The 'one kid who does a DOS attack' stands in complete opposition to the values of open source: open discussion and cooperation, reliance on facts rather than marketing or legal constraint, meritocracy.
I certainly wouldn't feel any sympathy for LinuxWorld after reading their unethical propaganda. Agreed. I don't have any sympathy for them. We need to keep the focus on their unethical behaviour, not create a side-show where they can garner sympathy and deflect the issue by giving them the opportunity to characterise us as nut cases.
Free speech is not about letting people you agree with say their piece. It is about letting people you violently disagree with say theirs.
Saying it's bad to DoS is a Troll?
I'll admit to being clueless... why is saying such a thing bad... some possibilities?
To 1... Well that is what my post meant. It is bad to DoS people, especially if you disagree with them. If that's controversial, then my post is even more on target than I thought.
To 2. I don't know whether they had a DoS attack or not. Some people report they did, some say no. Saying it definitely is not happening is a bit unreasonable given that a lot of people (not just Laura Didio and Darl) have complained of such things after doing things considered offensive to FOSS, so it strains credibility that they are all lying or deeply misled.
To 3. Let's see, slashdot has an audience in the millions, it is a free software advocacy site, there are reports of DoS attacks agains anti-FOSS web sites. It is pretty near 100% probability that, if anyone is launching a DOS attack, they read this site.
The only way I can understand that this is a troll is if it is un-acceptable to state that some FOSS advocates are over the top. your mod points are proving my point, folks.
It may or may not be true in this case, but you have to admit that it would not be very surprising if it was, as it is a consistent complaint of media people that when a story critical of FOSS is published, they get, almost literally, tarred and feathered. Now you are going to say that those are all 'bad' people. Sure, they are on the other side, but there is ample evidence that folks have indeed DDoS'd SCO, and phone Darl to utter death threats, and the like. This is a recurring theme. I find it hard to believe they are all making it up. It isn't credible. You don't like what he is doing? Agreed, neither do I.
Disagreement is fine, pointing out that columnists are clueless by pointing to fallacies and inconsistencies or logical errors is perfectly fair game. Comparing source code to demonstrate a lack of copyright infringement is absolutely fabulous. Abuse, making death threats and DDoS attack, as the SCO folks, Laura Didio, and countless others have complained of, does not help us.. The probability that someone who reads this site is responsible for those things pretty darn close to 1. So asking them to stop it, is perhaps patronizing for 999,999 people out of a million. How do you get to the 1 ?
I am neither an astroturfer, nor a troll. That my comment was modded as such is a very, very, mild version of the same logic. folks say something you don't like: call them a troll. As for trying to influence people... ummm... I had some vague impression that slashdot is an open source advocacy site. Isn't the whole point to influence people? If people are hurting the cause by very poor forms of advocacy, it is our job to call them on it. They they won't come out into the open and take responsibility for their actions, so no other means are available.
Sure, optimize single node performance first, but keep in mind that horizontal scaling is something to look for. Put N machines behind a load balancer, ingest gets scattered among 'n' machines, queries go to all simultaneously. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Databases :-)
Linux Virtual Server in front of several instances of your windows box will do, with some proxying stuff for queries. Probably cheaper than spending months trying to tweak single node to get to your scaling target, and will scale trivially much farther out.
Hacking is the cyber equivalent of physical war. Anonymous DoS attacks are cyber-terrorism. Someone says something you don't like, so you burn down their business. FOSS people need to help victims identify their attackers and assist, by any reasonable means available, the identification and prosecution of those responsible. Any other action just allows others to tar us all with the same brush.
In terms of debate, and the view of independant third parties, you are just handing sympathy and support to the other side. Stop it.
This is much like the MS aids conundrum. Should MS support generic drugs in the fight against aids? I do not know their position on this issue, but it would be interesting to hear. They are really stepping up to the plate on AIDS, but if the money ends up being just funnelled to multi-national pharmaceutical interests, that would not save nearly as many people, and has the potential for a PR backlash. On the other hand, if they endorse the production of knock-offs in the developing world, aren't they undermining their whole anti-piracy thrust? I do not envy them the choice.
perspective. There was a lot of activity in the workstation
market at the time, and most of those companies were in
the valley, and were likely talking to each other. It only has a screenshot of kde, completely misses all
the innovations of X (aside from mentioning separation
of mechanism from policy, which is very important.)
that there was a playing field to implement all sorts of GUIs and there were.
and much more... You could see what PC OS's should do
back in the early 90's but what the PC's didn't because the
hardware of the time wasn't upto it.
Maybe they would commute from home ?
http://www.freedomship.com/
work, they cut you off completely in many US jurisdictions, or force you to work at jobs in order to earn their welfare.
If you are part of the working poor, you are eating your KD in the states, and you get sick, what happens? You lose everything paying medical bills, and once you are poor enough, the state will take care of you.
In Canada, getting sick isnt a sentence of poverty. There is a safety net. Social entitlements like health care, and welfare are, by far, the biggest ticket items in government budgets.
In the US? Defense. Canada isnt heaven, but compared to the US, we do a far better job of taking care of our own, because doing so is considered a societal priority.
Im not going to defend Mike Harris. Im not trying to promote or defend any cuts to the social safety net, but simply contrasting it with the US one, which I think it is safe to say, is inferior to what we have here.
If youre saying that our welfare program isnt enough to live on, well, OK, but it is already the biggest program in the government, in terms of budget, next to servicing the debt which was built by.... social spending we could not afford...
At least we did not do it by invading St-Pierre & Miquelon.
I think folks who advocate tax cuts are completely irresponsible, but so are those who want to set standards
based on needs without regard to what the tax base
lets us pay for. The last generation paid for welfare by
saddling us with 30 billion in debt servicing per year. Lets not leave an even heavier burden for our children.
The only way to improve benefits is to either raise taxes
or pay off the debt. Were stuck. Well do what we can, but youre right, there wont be a chicken in every pot.
I dont know if BT was more like a European PTT mandated monopoly, or more like a independant company with a defacto monopoly like in North america. In North America, the phone companies own the COs. So the word deregulated means nobody messes with the phone companies, and they can do whatever they want (ie. do not allow any third parties access to their networks, competitors would have to build an entirely separate network.) The US is highly de-regulated, in their own understanding of the term. For example, the Cable companies explicitly fight not to be considered a telecom carrier, because that is more heavily regulated. In the US, DSL is open to third parties, but cable is not.
In Canada, the same forces you describe in the UK are at work, but they come about because of intense regulation of organizations that control the last mile, to encourage them to share. Hence third party ISPs can obtain wholesale access to DSL and cable networks. I havent heard of any access at the local loop level yet.
ya ever heard of the underground railroad ? Slaves would escape from the south, and ... where do you
think they went? Do you
think they all went back to the US after the civil war?
Do you know that the majority of the population of
both Vancouver and Toronto is non-white ? That
In Canada, the splashy news reports that come out
once in a while are about asian gangs, not blacks?
That our biggest crime problem / drug dealers are biker gangs, and they seem to be mostly white? That in Europe, the slums are mostly arab and gypsy, depending on the country...
Looking at it another way... Why the heck do you have blacks in slums? Id say it is because the US public education and social safety net has so many holes that folks in the inner city are completely written off and have very little chance to get out, generation after generation. In other words, you are proving my thesis. Society doesnt give a shit, so there are slums.
Dont tell anyone, but 1.609 foreign kilometers are hiding
inside every good old American Mile. Like everything else
the foreign versions are smaller. Worse, I hear they
come from France! I guess youll have to call them
Freedometers then.