Rest is my untested knowledge for which I accept no liability.
I believe it all hinges on third party liability to a breach tho - a question of fact and degree will not suffice in claims like this. Third party liability is only established through knowing participation (knowledgeable assistance if you will).
Actual knowledge is one piece constructive, and one piece subjective. Claimants often try to claim entirely on the constructive knowledge front (so they don't have to show the state of mind) and ignore actual knowledge, which requires a dishonest state of mind. and so the argument goes a dishonest mind is hard to prove when you don't know what's going across your tubes. but then there's also a grey area: wilful blindness/recklessness and the argument you can't be guilty of being reckless as to data exchanged when you don't monitor the data upon international standard that avoids actionable per se).
I think from a liability point of view, ISPs need to take a step back, and start offering unrestricted plans that don't acknowledge *anything* about the content they're handling.
I say that because I think safe harbour provisions are an all or nothing defence. Similar to automatism as a defence to homicide. Let me explain that one. Murder and manslaughter constitue homicide. Murder is a specific intent crime - that is, to be found guilty, a jury will be instructed that they must find the action of killing and the state of mind to kill (a specific intent to kill) coincide at the time of killing. In short that means the mens rea (the guity mind) and actus reus (actions) of a killing must coincide to commit a murder. Without either, you are not guilty of murder, but may be guilty of homicide.
The intent for murder must be specific - an actuak intent to kill someone or a virtual certainty as to that effect. A virtual certainty is best described if you think of a bomber on a plane - he has the intent to kill people around him when he sets off a bomb, yet it is a virtual certainty that he will kill the rest when the plane crashes, which establishes an indirect/oblique intent.
Automatons are not responsible for their actions since they lack intent. So... if you're intoxicated (either by prescription drugs, illicit drugs or alcohol) to the extent you cannot possibly form the intent to kill (mens rea), which is so far beyond being drunk it calls for an intoxicated person to be on the brink of death almost, then you can claim automatism.
(before someone goes off to kill someone, bare in mind that issues of public policy will defeat self-induced automatism)
Automatism is an all or nothing defence. In so-called "normal cases" of homicide where someone lacks the intent due to intoxication, or someone takes a reckless risk where it was unreasonable to do so in the circumstance and they jury can infer they should have reasonably appreciated that risk, then that person is found not guilty of murder as they lack specific intent, but can still be found guilty of manslaughter.
If we apply the principal to copyright infringement, and imagine that the safe habour provisions are like a person operating as an automatom, then we assume that should a person ever be proven to be capable for forming a state of mind, fulfilling any mens rea, then they destroy their lawful defence. With an all or nothing defence, there are no levels to mitigate liability. You are either innocent or guilty of an offence if you have or have not a defense.
When ISPs such as VM start to move beyond their role as providers of a service, they start to acknowledge intent, preventing them from relying on their safe harbour defence
At the moment we all have a contract with ISPs. Under contract, in which they are obliged to provide a service, as we are o
I should have said, "mass/velocity chart". iirc it was a grid with velocity down the left side, and mass on the top with the cells filled with the expected distance a hapless punter (you were a taxi driver) would be thrown if you hit them head on
Exactly! People don't seem to want to learn nowadays.
Defeating copying schemes has always been an educational past-time of mine. I learned to write my 8's almost perfectly when I copied out, number by number, the Quarantine chart mass/velocity chart because I couldn't photocopy the black text on dark brown glossy paper.
I even improved my memory when I memorized both the X-Wing and Tie Fighter manual keywords... that was a lot of manuals for a 12 y/o - I actually think it helped. I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't capable of picking up a software manual:D
So, TPM is a way for me to spice up on my logic probing eh?
A lot of people I know have taken to the "if it's not free, I don't like it, i won't use it" realm of stupidity.
RMS isn't to blame for personal decisions, but I feel the aura surrounding modern IP protections, the perception of the laws that regulate and protect IP, combined with this Jesus-like figure who's opinions are compelling and often desirable, is automatically damning of anything restrictive.
Lessig's book, Free Culture, is a fantastic introduction to the law for a non-lawyer. It is rather repetitive in some instances, but it does stress the important diversity of protection we have, and protection that is beneficial.
For example, when I see someone say, "I don't like IP laws, they're not good", or "I love IP laws, they protect my job", I automatically begin to dismiss this person as ill-advised or out of their depth. My reasoning is simple: there is no such thing as "IP laws".
Intellectual Property is form of non-corporeal asset that we give good legal and equitable title to, because we believe it deserves recognition beyond a physical form - almost always because we can't represent the physical form as to control it (a patent), or the physical form has no established representation to make it distinguishable as to offer it protection (think one CD to another CD).
The legal definitions are more precise than this, but consider, for an instant "IP laws" don't exist. So what do we use to enforce IP? We use a collection of laws that protect IP - on the battle's front-line we have copyright and we have patent. There's nothing special about either copyright or patent. They're not there to represent IP and perpetually protect it like we would land. No, we instead offer "limited protection" (or a "limited monopoly") for a specified period.
Unfortunately some people are greedy and capitalism does as capitalism wants - because it can. We elect an "elective dictatorship" which take legislative queues from those in a position born out of their money. Those with the money ultimately strive to control their assets as to protect this money. We see big name companies push and push for longer extensions for their monopolies simply to protect their status rather than fall. It's the way the world works - it's not going to change any time soon, but we can limit the control.
Unfortunately more and more people seem to echo the same voice, "I don't want to reduce copyright/patent, i want to abolish it, I believe everything should be freeeee!11". You people are detrimental to the cause. Abolishing IP will destroy R&D. If IP was outlawed over night, companies would stop working with one another and stop producing new technologies that require immense resources and financial investment: why bother when you can copy something and resell that? Why bother when all the money you spend on some research is for naught when someone takes apart your product and copies and reproduces it at a fraction of the cost since they don't have to account for the financial cost of research?
The solution to the problems we face is actually to extend the breadth of copyright and patent. Preserve what we have now (arguably what we had in the 90s). This is not the same as extending protection periods - I'm largely against that. But we should focus on remedying individual legal issues while appling an element of proportionality.
Proportionality is a big thing in law (tm) - especially if you're an EU citizen. Proportionality and interpretative application allow issues that would normally be wrong doings a measure of beneficial application. Without confusing myself, it is to say that you don't have to find something utterly illegal because the law says it is in black and white - times change and and future developments are rarely well envisaged, and proportionality allows us to accept transitions in the law.
Lets look at an example: check out this recent Podcast on scraping. The problem is a grey area with Copyright. The remedy is not in "IP l
Works well, but is rather expensive. Has an oversized NAT table to help with UDP server pings, so this will remedy and torrent problems you might have with your current setup.
QoS system is fairly flexible with an intuitive GUI and many preconfigured service options.
Has an option to pack the output frames completely (harms XBox Live possibly) as well as delay non-prio packets in favour of VOIP/gaming/as you configure.
It's more annoying than you might think. I've done it, all my friends have done it, my cousin's done it and our dog will be doing it soon.
Don't don't don't. It's a VASTLY under subscribed and overly competitive market. Once you think you're the best, and you're successful, you become too reliant on a core group of customers who won't last for ever.
There are reseller accounts available with lots of ISPs, but few are on a commission basis (ie: you're the one who has to cover your client's costs and invoice them). Flat fees are usually available to dedicated servers licensors @ £50/m+ - but the market is changing and I'm not at all surprised if they're cheaper.
Plesk - possibly the worst thing I've ever used. Convoluted backend I couldn't hack on to extend pop-before-smtp the way I wanted. CPanel - the original but very costly 6 years ago when I last used it. Has some impressive addons EnsimDirectAdmin - Not one I've used personally, but I hear its ok. VHCS - Freeware. Never used it personally. But there are many OS projects and forks out there if you lookhardenough ]
Cubepanel and BlueQuartz worth a mention.
Most of these project offer "lite" versions which are free for restricted personal use. The only major difference between the free and paid versions is that the latter has multi-user and reseller capabilities.
I'd recommending taking up a decent Linux or BSD distro with a proven track record of security fixes. "apt-get update" is sufficient for the home user, but realistically, you want to track purely security updates. Consider an enterprise OS (CentOS?!)
There have been several major changes to British liberties recently - the Terrorism Act is the beast behind almost all of them. Those changes - such as the outright ban on demonstrating near parliament and the requirement of express permission in order to do so nearby - are completely distinct from what has happened here.
Also, don't confuse the recent legal order curtailing legitimate demonstrations to a specified area either (Brian Haw has been protesting the Iraq war outside of Parliament for 6 years!)
What has happened here is quite simple: an irate Scientologist who doesn't know the Public Order Act as much as the officer involved, persuaded a PC to halt the demonstration because of the wording on the sign.
This was a mistake by the officer based upon the facts and wording of the sign which, as the CPS said, cannot be deemed to be threatening, insulting or abusive (Public Order Act).
The "cult" description of Scientology is now a matter of fact within UK (there's an EU opinion too) born from the obiter of Justice Latey from a 1984 high court ruling which the sign incongruously quoted.
The officer should have better exercised his office of constable, chosen to read what written, and make up his own mind (in the UK a police officer is responsible for his own actions, he cannot be commanded by those senior to do anything he does not believe is lawful - he is personally liable for what he does and does not, save for contractual/employment obligations). Here the PC showed he was inadequately aware of the Public Order Act which permits the 15 year old's protest.
The CPS was right. They did the lawful thing. It would never have gone to court from the get go. It is an utterly laughable mistake by the PC that even Lionel Hutz would have recognised!
I hope the London constabulary involved is property briefed on their public order duties. I personally feel this was entirely avoidable - especially since R(Laporte).
I don't have the kind of cash they're asking for, for a graphics specific FPGA. If they could tailor the board towards the FGPA market in general, I'm sure they'd find people interested in more than just it's rendering capability (me!!).
I'm concerned about the shelf-life after I'm done tinkering.
I'd like an I2C bus, a few led connectors, and some magic so that I can connect a general purpose daughter board the FPGA's address bus (ie: implement USB, LAN, audio support that way). Every FPGA should be able to run as a Tanenbaum CPU by law!
As far as rendering goes I can't see an FPGA being as fast as an ASIC - propagation delay is going to hammer it, and syncing will be a bitch - but I'm still interested in what it can do offline (assuming I can get a vesa console:D). If the card can do offline rendering efficiently enough to experiment with discrete pipelines (more gates = more fp precision!) I'd be a happy graphics geek.
thats right. I guess I should have said that - the BKL is the preempt sense wasn't really a lock, although it was a mutual exclusion mechanism... tbh, I don't know what you call a lockless lock nowadays.
IM's patch, amongst a host of other things, adds down(&kernel_sem) to the lock_kernel (and up() to unlock) to making it a true lock.
It's interesting to note that copy and save (CAS/CAS2) instructions have been around in many architectures for nearly a decade (longer still for some). It's surprising to see lockless programming (vital to pre-empting) launching a come back, to make better use of CPUs, instead of faster CPUs with more clock cycles. Will the paradigm shift to concurrent programming models slow Moore's law?
I'm brave enough to want per CPU microkernels (with a messaging master?). I envisage all multi-CPU systems addressing memory in an non-unified manor soon enough - it'll be like the jump from segmented addressing to protected mode, but for CPUs.
The monolithic design is slowly forming a focal point in performance: something has to do a lot of locked switching - if SMP machines could do what they do best and handle IRQs and threads concurrently without waiting for a lock (they're better spent sending/receiving lockless messages), life would be easier on the scalability gurus.
There are a few added benefits from a fully real-time OS that most people gloss over.
For example, you will *know* your PC will never become utterly unusable to the point it's unsafe with your data. ie: while it's handling many IO operations (say you're being ddosed whilst transcoding a dvd and flossing with a sata cable) unless you run completely out of system memory. Nothing should run away wasn't design to. This stems from the predictability of code execution times that pre-empting offers.
The predictably allows devices to make guarantees, for example, if your mouse is aware it's going to get a time slice, at worst, every 100ms, at least it'll be doing something every 100ms and you gain a visually responsive mouse (aye, it's not as great as it could be). The non-preempt side of life has your CPU tied up doing work that was sits inside a BKL - ie: dealing with a character device or ioctl - your mouse could be waiting 500ms or 1000ms before updating it's position: giving you the impression your PC is dying.
Code that is stuck inside the BKL isn't pre-emptable (you *must* wait for it to finish.) - there's a lot of it that does a lot of regular stuff. Often this will hold up other cores if you've got a cooperative multi-threaded program. The net effect is a slow PC.
RT systems have a different use: they want a guarentee that something is unable to ever delay the system, in particular interrupts. The BKL allows code to take a time slice and run away with it, because you thought it was very important and wrapped it in [un]lock_kernel. This then delays IRQs (IRQs cant run until the lock has finish - at least, I'd like to believe second level IRQs can't run, I'm unsure of the specifics) which will delay data coming in and out of your PC - hard file, disk and display buffers suffer: they fill and you start to loose data because there's nothing dealing with it.
yes I agree. the BKL wasn't fair - which worked. happiness. but hey my views are pointless because I'm pro desktop/nvidia/life (and I have a soul).
The new semaphore implementation gives way in a very fair manor proving that sometimes you can be too fair and Kon was right from the get go (a desktop user's opinion, i don't mean to bait). if something didn't explicitly ask for a time slice, ie: a kernel section was preempted by an interrupt and then queued back in normally, then it doesn't get one until the pope said yes. the BKL as we knew it would allow a section enclosed in [un]lock_kernel to queue jump - at the expense of some extra code trickery.
Sadly the BKL was one of the more demanding locks - if it didn't get what it wanted fast enough, subtle differences in character device operations, which all seem to be strategically linked to the tty and other vfs layers from what I can make of KernelTrap, would work against the overall throughput of the kernel and into usermode (archaic ioctls suffer)
the best "fix" would be to implement the old semaphore types for depreciated BKL-only use (don't export them?) - but the old semaphore code was quite substantial, and required some arch specific implementations which have now... I don't see that much work being reintroduced in it's old form any time soon.
new semaphore code was introduced that simplified locking. Unfortunately in many kernel situations it's proven to affect performance at around something like 40% - which isn't just considerable its disastrous.
rather than merge the old locking code back in, and reintroduce the many different locking primitives they had, someone decided to simply reenable the BKL - the downside of which is they have to either fix the regression caused by the simpler semaphore code (not likely, it's very simple and clean - everyone's favourite pet/child) or remove instances of where the semaphore code is likely to be called (the BKL).
Yeh - Lord Hailsham's "elective dictatorship" rings true more often than not nowadays. I once found it hard to understand - but not any longer.
Belmarsh was, from a legal prospective, the House of Lords telling the Government in no uncertain way, that if they decided to break the constitution in the way were doing - ignoring the Human Rights Act which enshires the European Convention on Humans Rights in to British law - they would break their refrain, and comment on the Government - something I believe is still unheard.
Pipelines are an implementation technique, not part of an architecture I disagree with you somewhat. Pipelines are integral to foundation of the processing of the execution of the architecture and not simply an implementation technique.
I'm happy to admit the modern demand on data flow is giving the effect that pipelines are a method of implementation (take vector units and the need to poll them), but if you ignore data bottle necks, you'll still find a von Neumann CPU will be a pipelined machine with many alternative accumulators, execution paths and multipliers than a similarly functional Harvard CPU which will employ limited execution paths and fewer accumulators/multipliers/adders instead favouring raw clock rate.
I am of course referring the execute stage - not the instruction pipeline: this can be confusing, as many CPUs have multiple state pipelines so that they may perform ground work such as fetch, decode and execute simultaneously - but this is not a heavily pipelined mechanism unless they can accumulate on the same clock. Heavily pipelined architectures will allow simultaneous execution and then accumulate, whereas general purpose machines will accumulate on the next clock.
For anyone who's studied the UK constitution, and in particular, Lord Nicholls' dicta in Belmarsh, it is frightening to see so obviously what one Government has done to the UK in a way that will effectively bind successive governments: not for want of power, but for want of justification should they revoke popularist statues that give the illusion of service.
ARM, for example, has an SIMD extension called Neon, which makes audio decoding possible at something like 15 MHz. ARM is a heavily pipelined architecture with a reduced instruction set designed to perform a specific tasks like decoding. It takes a lot of silicon to allow a pipeline to decode things outside a tradition math/vector unit. Rarely is there any kind of cross over or feedback late in the execution stage making pipelines less predicable. To make things worst, they're hard to fence, which makes pipelined operations awkward to preempt.
I don't think it's been an abuse of position (in the vertical monopolistic sense), but rather the development of a technology that created a parallel effect on the market winner/common supplier. I believe there are more benefits from using general purpose CPUs. If MS had taken the pure RISC route we'd have co-processors for everything now.
The future will lie in complex instruction sets that are incrementally updated with very long word "feature pipelines". Transmeta had a point with VLW CPUs, but suffered because they tried to use the tech to emulate general purpose functionality, rather than have legacy fetch-decode-execute silicon to do the mundane stuff, and offload to VLW for bespoke applications.
Your comments on PAE are spot on btw: it is an ugly hack, but so are most methods of indirect access. I can't see translation going any time soon. We do it everywhere - protected state, dynamic linking, mmio... everywhere. Unless CPU manufacturers start providing wider internal archs that aren't linked to the width of the address bus, we're not going to see that (multiplexing is expensive!!)
Regarding the UK, it might be possible to get damages from a UK court as Art. 82 is directly applicable (it is after all a treaty article and regulation) and thus has horizontal effect.
One would expect enforcement in a UK court to provide a little more than just a civil award between competitors. If you follow the obiter from Garden Cottage Foods which hints at individual rememdy, Courage v Crehan should apply?
Slashdot Mirror
Parent comment is right.
For UK/EU ppl out there, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2002/20022013.htm and http://www.out-law.com/page-431 for the safe harbour provisions.
Rest is my untested knowledge for which I accept no liability.
I believe it all hinges on third party liability to a breach tho - a question of fact and degree will not suffice in claims like this. Third party liability is only established through knowing participation (knowledgeable assistance if you will).
Actual knowledge is one piece constructive, and one piece subjective. Claimants often try to claim entirely on the constructive knowledge front (so they don't have to show the state of mind) and ignore actual knowledge, which requires a dishonest state of mind. and so the argument goes a dishonest mind is hard to prove when you don't know what's going across your tubes. but then there's also a grey area: wilful blindness/recklessness and the argument you can't be guilty of being reckless as to data exchanged when you don't monitor the data upon international standard that avoids actionable per se).
I think from a liability point of view, ISPs need to take a step back, and start offering unrestricted plans that don't acknowledge *anything* about the content they're handling.
I say that because I think safe harbour provisions are an all or nothing defence. Similar to automatism as a defence to homicide. Let me explain that one. Murder and manslaughter constitue homicide. Murder is a specific intent crime - that is, to be found guilty, a jury will be instructed that they must find the action of killing and the state of mind to kill (a specific intent to kill) coincide at the time of killing. In short that means the mens rea (the guity mind) and actus reus (actions) of a killing must coincide to commit a murder. Without either, you are not guilty of murder, but may be guilty of homicide.
The intent for murder must be specific - an actuak intent to kill someone or a virtual certainty as to that effect. A virtual certainty is best described if you think of a bomber on a plane - he has the intent to kill people around him when he sets off a bomb, yet it is a virtual certainty that he will kill the rest when the plane crashes, which establishes an indirect/oblique intent.
Automatons are not responsible for their actions since they lack intent. So... if you're intoxicated (either by prescription drugs, illicit drugs or alcohol) to the extent you cannot possibly form the intent to kill (mens rea), which is so far beyond being drunk it calls for an intoxicated person to be on the brink of death almost, then you can claim automatism.
(before someone goes off to kill someone, bare in mind that issues of public policy will defeat self-induced automatism)
Automatism is an all or nothing defence. In so-called "normal cases" of homicide where someone lacks the intent due to intoxication, or someone takes a reckless risk where it was unreasonable to do so in the circumstance and they jury can infer they should have reasonably appreciated that risk, then that person is found not guilty of murder as they lack specific intent, but can still be found guilty of manslaughter.
If we apply the principal to copyright infringement, and imagine that the safe habour provisions are like a person operating as an automatom, then we assume that should a person ever be proven to be capable for forming a state of mind, fulfilling any mens rea, then they destroy their lawful defence. With an all or nothing defence, there are no levels to mitigate liability. You are either innocent or guilty of an offence if you have or have not a defense.
When ISPs such as VM start to move beyond their role as providers of a service, they start to acknowledge intent, preventing them from relying on their safe harbour defence
At the moment we all have a contract with ISPs. Under contract, in which they are obliged to provide a service, as we are o
That is more confusing than Lost. I'm actually frightened by that man.
wikileaks, followed by cryptome.org for doing a better job and mirroring the same content
Matt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(game)
I should have said, "mass/velocity chart". iirc it was a grid with velocity down the left side, and mass on the top with the cells filled with the expected distance a hapless punter (you were a taxi driver) would be thrown if you hit them head on
its true, I find the digg front page easier than the slashdot search bar
Exactly! People don't seem to want to learn nowadays.
:D
Defeating copying schemes has always been an educational past-time of mine. I learned to write my 8's almost perfectly when I copied out, number by number, the Quarantine chart mass/velocity chart because I couldn't photocopy the black text on dark brown glossy paper.
I even improved my memory when I memorized both the X-Wing and Tie Fighter manual keywords... that was a lot of manuals for a 12 y/o - I actually think it helped. I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't capable of picking up a software manual
So, TPM is a way for me to spice up on my logic probing eh?
Matt
A lot of people I know have taken to the "if it's not free, I don't like it, i won't use it" realm of stupidity.
RMS isn't to blame for personal decisions, but I feel the aura surrounding modern IP protections, the perception of the laws that regulate and protect IP, combined with this Jesus-like figure who's opinions are compelling and often desirable, is automatically damning of anything restrictive.
Lessig's book, Free Culture, is a fantastic introduction to the law for a non-lawyer. It is rather repetitive in some instances, but it does stress the important diversity of protection we have, and protection that is beneficial.
For example, when I see someone say, "I don't like IP laws, they're not good", or "I love IP laws, they protect my job", I automatically begin to dismiss this person as ill-advised or out of their depth. My reasoning is simple: there is no such thing as "IP laws".
Intellectual Property is form of non-corporeal asset that we give good legal and equitable title to, because we believe it deserves recognition beyond a physical form - almost always because we can't represent the physical form as to control it (a patent), or the physical form has no established representation to make it distinguishable as to offer it protection (think one CD to another CD).
The legal definitions are more precise than this, but consider, for an instant "IP laws" don't exist. So what do we use to enforce IP? We use a collection of laws that protect IP - on the battle's front-line we have copyright and we have patent. There's nothing special about either copyright or patent. They're not there to represent IP and perpetually protect it like we would land. No, we instead offer "limited protection" (or a "limited monopoly") for a specified period.
Unfortunately some people are greedy and capitalism does as capitalism wants - because it can. We elect an "elective dictatorship" which take legislative queues from those in a position born out of their money. Those with the money ultimately strive to control their assets as to protect this money. We see big name companies push and push for longer extensions for their monopolies simply to protect their status rather than fall. It's the way the world works - it's not going to change any time soon, but we can limit the control.
Unfortunately more and more people seem to echo the same voice, "I don't want to reduce copyright/patent, i want to abolish it, I believe everything should be freeeee!11". You people are detrimental to the cause. Abolishing IP will destroy R&D. If IP was outlawed over night, companies would stop working with one another and stop producing new technologies that require immense resources and financial investment: why bother when you can copy something and resell that? Why bother when all the money you spend on some research is for naught when someone takes apart your product and copies and reproduces it at a fraction of the cost since they don't have to account for the financial cost of research?
The solution to the problems we face is actually to extend the breadth of copyright and patent. Preserve what we have now (arguably what we had in the 90s). This is not the same as extending protection periods - I'm largely against that. But we should focus on remedying individual legal issues while appling an element of proportionality.
Proportionality is a big thing in law (tm) - especially if you're an EU citizen. Proportionality and interpretative application allow issues that would normally be wrong doings a measure of beneficial application. Without confusing myself, it is to say that you don't have to find something utterly illegal because the law says it is in black and white - times change and and future developments are rarely well envisaged, and proportionality allows us to accept transitions in the law.
Lets look at an example: check out this recent Podcast on scraping. The problem is a grey area with Copyright. The remedy is not in "IP l
http://games.dlink.com/products/?pid=370
Works well, but is rather expensive. Has an oversized NAT table to help with UDP server pings, so this will remedy and torrent problems you might have with your current setup.
QoS system is fairly flexible with an intuitive GUI and many preconfigured service options.
Has an option to pack the output frames completely (harms XBox Live possibly) as well as delay non-prio packets in favour of VOIP/gaming/as you configure.
Matt
Think. Stop.
It's more annoying than you might think. I've done it, all my friends have done it, my cousin's done it and our dog will be doing it soon.
Don't don't don't. It's a VASTLY under subscribed and overly competitive market. Once you think you're the best, and you're successful, you become too reliant on a core group of customers who won't last for ever.
There are reseller accounts available with lots of ISPs, but few are on a commission basis (ie: you're the one who has to cover your client's costs and invoice them). Flat fees are usually available to dedicated servers licensors @ £50/m+ - but the market is changing and I'm not at all surprised if they're cheaper.
Plesk - possibly the worst thing I've ever used. Convoluted backend I couldn't hack on to extend pop-before-smtp the way I wanted.
CPanel - the original but very costly 6 years ago when I last used it. Has some impressive addons
EnsimDirectAdmin - Not one I've used personally, but I hear its ok.
VHCS - Freeware. Never used it personally. But there are many OS projects and forks out there if you look hard enough ]
Cubepanel and BlueQuartz worth a mention.
Most of these project offer "lite" versions which are free for restricted personal use. The only major difference between the free and paid versions is that the latter has multi-user and reseller capabilities.
I'd recommending taking up a decent Linux or BSD distro with a proven track record of security fixes. "apt-get update" is sufficient for the home user, but realistically, you want to track purely security updates. Consider an enterprise OS (CentOS?!)
Matt
Damn.
:(
I don't want to believe they're that incompetant in the first place
Matt
This isn't a major liberties issue.
There have been several major changes to British liberties recently - the Terrorism Act is the beast behind almost all of them. Those changes - such as the outright ban on demonstrating near parliament and the requirement of express permission in order to do so nearby - are completely distinct from what has happened here.
Also, don't confuse the recent legal order curtailing legitimate demonstrations to a specified area either (Brian Haw has been protesting the Iraq war outside of Parliament for 6 years!)
What has happened here is quite simple: an irate Scientologist who doesn't know the Public Order Act as much as the officer involved, persuaded a PC to halt the demonstration because of the wording on the sign.
This was a mistake by the officer based upon the facts and wording of the sign which, as the CPS said, cannot be deemed to be threatening, insulting or abusive (Public Order Act).
The "cult" description of Scientology is now a matter of fact within UK (there's an EU opinion too) born from the obiter of Justice Latey from a 1984 high court ruling which the sign incongruously quoted.
The officer should have better exercised his office of constable, chosen to read what written, and make up his own mind (in the UK a police officer is responsible for his own actions, he cannot be commanded by those senior to do anything he does not believe is lawful - he is personally liable for what he does and does not, save for contractual/employment obligations). Here the PC showed he was inadequately aware of the Public Order Act which permits the 15 year old's protest.
The CPS was right. They did the lawful thing. It would never have gone to court from the get go. It is an utterly laughable mistake by the PC that even Lionel Hutz would have recognised!
I hope the London constabulary involved is property briefed on their public order duties. I personally feel this was entirely avoidable - especially since R(Laporte).
Matt
I don't have the kind of cash they're asking for, for a graphics specific FPGA. If they could tailor the board towards the FGPA market in general, I'm sure they'd find people interested in more than just it's rendering capability (me!!).
:D). If the card can do offline rendering efficiently enough to experiment with discrete pipelines (more gates = more fp precision!) I'd be a happy graphics geek.
I'm concerned about the shelf-life after I'm done tinkering.
I'd like an I2C bus, a few led connectors, and some magic so that I can connect a general purpose daughter board the FPGA's address bus (ie: implement USB, LAN, audio support that way). Every FPGA should be able to run as a Tanenbaum CPU by law!
As far as rendering goes I can't see an FPGA being as fast as an ASIC - propagation delay is going to hammer it, and syncing will be a bitch - but I'm still interested in what it can do offline (assuming I can get a vesa console
Good luck!
Matt
first thing I thought... back then I thought WOW innovation, the hardware DMCA does suck.
and I still do! it's a great piece of tech.
If you don't want to be tracked in public, stop emitting a signal.
Matt
thats right. I guess I should have said that - the BKL is the preempt sense wasn't really a lock, although it was a mutual exclusion mechanism... tbh, I don't know what you call a lockless lock nowadays.
IM's patch, amongst a host of other things, adds down(&kernel_sem) to the lock_kernel (and up() to unlock) to making it a true lock.
It's interesting to note that copy and save (CAS/CAS2) instructions have been around in many architectures for nearly a decade (longer still for some). It's surprising to see lockless programming (vital to pre-empting) launching a come back, to make better use of CPUs, instead of faster CPUs with more clock cycles. Will the paradigm shift to concurrent programming models slow Moore's law?
Matt
I'm brave enough to want per CPU microkernels (with a messaging master?). I envisage all multi-CPU systems addressing memory in an non-unified manor soon enough - it'll be like the jump from segmented addressing to protected mode, but for CPUs.
The monolithic design is slowly forming a focal point in performance: something has to do a lot of locked switching - if SMP machines could do what they do best and handle IRQs and threads concurrently without waiting for a lock (they're better spent sending/receiving lockless messages), life would be easier on the scalability gurus.
There are a few added benefits from a fully real-time OS that most people gloss over.
:)
For example, you will *know* your PC will never become utterly unusable to the point it's unsafe with your data. ie: while it's handling many IO operations (say you're being ddosed whilst transcoding a dvd and flossing with a sata cable) unless you run completely out of system memory. Nothing should run away wasn't design to. This stems from the predictability of code execution times that pre-empting offers.
The predictably allows devices to make guarantees, for example, if your mouse is aware it's going to get a time slice, at worst, every 100ms, at least it'll be doing something every 100ms and you gain a visually responsive mouse (aye, it's not as great as it could be). The non-preempt side of life has your CPU tied up doing work that was sits inside a BKL - ie: dealing with a character device or ioctl - your mouse could be waiting 500ms or 1000ms before updating it's position: giving you the impression your PC is dying.
Code that is stuck inside the BKL isn't pre-emptable (you *must* wait for it to finish.) - there's a lot of it that does a lot of regular stuff. Often this will hold up other cores if you've got a cooperative multi-threaded program. The net effect is a slow PC.
RT systems have a different use: they want a guarentee that something is unable to ever delay the system, in particular interrupts. The BKL allows code to take a time slice and run away with it, because you thought it was very important and wrapped it in [un]lock_kernel. This then delays IRQs (IRQs cant run until the lock has finish - at least, I'd like to believe second level IRQs can't run, I'm unsure of the specifics) which will delay data coming in and out of your PC - hard file, disk and display buffers suffer: they fill and you start to loose data because there's nothing dealing with it.
Preempt kernels are good
(viva the Desktop)
Matt
yes I agree. the BKL wasn't fair - which worked. happiness. but hey my views are pointless because I'm pro desktop/nvidia/life (and I have a soul).
The new semaphore implementation gives way in a very fair manor proving that sometimes you can be too fair and Kon was right from the get go (a desktop user's opinion, i don't mean to bait). if something didn't explicitly ask for a time slice, ie: a kernel section was preempted by an interrupt and then queued back in normally, then it doesn't get one until the pope said yes. the BKL as we knew it would allow a section enclosed in [un]lock_kernel to queue jump - at the expense of some extra code trickery.
Sadly the BKL was one of the more demanding locks - if it didn't get what it wanted fast enough, subtle differences in character device operations, which all seem to be strategically linked to the tty and other vfs layers from what I can make of KernelTrap, would work against the overall throughput of the kernel and into usermode (archaic ioctls suffer)
the best "fix" would be to implement the old semaphore types for depreciated BKL-only use (don't export them?) - but the old semaphore code was quite substantial, and required some arch specific implementations which have now... I don't see that much work being reintroduced in it's old form any time soon.
Matt
new semaphore code was introduced that simplified locking. Unfortunately in many kernel situations it's proven to affect performance at around something like 40% - which isn't just considerable its disastrous.
rather than merge the old locking code back in, and reintroduce the many different locking primitives they had, someone decided to simply reenable the BKL - the downside of which is they have to either fix the regression caused by the simpler semaphore code (not likely, it's very simple and clean - everyone's favourite pet/child) or remove instances of where the semaphore code is likely to be called (the BKL).
Matt
Yeh - Lord Hailsham's "elective dictatorship" rings true more often than not nowadays. I once found it hard to understand - but not any longer.
Belmarsh was, from a legal prospective, the House of Lords telling the Government in no uncertain way, that if they decided to break the constitution in the way were doing - ignoring the Human Rights Act which enshires the European Convention on Humans Rights in to British law - they would break their refrain, and comment on the Government - something I believe is still unheard.
I'm happy to admit the modern demand on data flow is giving the effect that pipelines are a method of implementation (take vector units and the need to poll them), but if you ignore data bottle necks, you'll still find a von Neumann CPU will be a pipelined machine with many alternative accumulators, execution paths and multipliers than a similarly functional Harvard CPU which will employ limited execution paths and fewer accumulators/multipliers/adders instead favouring raw clock rate.
I am of course referring the execute stage - not the instruction pipeline: this can be confusing, as many CPUs have multiple state pipelines so that they may perform ground work such as fetch, decode and execute simultaneously - but this is not a heavily pipelined mechanism unless they can accumulate on the same clock. Heavily pipelined architectures will allow simultaneous execution and then accumulate, whereas general purpose machines will accumulate on the next clock.
Matt
Available at http://www.noliberties.com/
and if you're a UK view, for free here,
http://www.channel4.com/video/true-stories-taking-liberties/catchup.html
(WMP11 unfortunately)
For anyone who's studied the UK constitution, and in particular, Lord Nicholls' dicta in Belmarsh, it is frightening to see so obviously what one Government has done to the UK in a way that will effectively bind successive governments: not for want of power, but for want of justification should they revoke popularist statues that give the illusion of service.
Matt
I don't think it's been an abuse of position (in the vertical monopolistic sense), but rather the development of a technology that created a parallel effect on the market winner/common supplier. I believe there are more benefits from using general purpose CPUs. If MS had taken the pure RISC route we'd have co-processors for everything now.
The future will lie in complex instruction sets that are incrementally updated with very long word "feature pipelines". Transmeta had a point with VLW CPUs, but suffered because they tried to use the tech to emulate general purpose functionality, rather than have legacy fetch-decode-execute silicon to do the mundane stuff, and offload to VLW for bespoke applications.
Your comments on PAE are spot on btw: it is an ugly hack, but so are most methods of indirect access. I can't see translation going any time soon. We do it everywhere - protected state, dynamic linking, mmio... everywhere. Unless CPU manufacturers start providing wider internal archs that aren't linked to the width of the address bus, we're not going to see that (multiplexing is expensive!!)
Matt
I did a little checking.
Regarding the UK, it might be possible to get damages from a UK court as Art. 82 is directly applicable (it is after all a treaty article and regulation) and thus has horizontal effect.
One would expect enforcement in a UK court to provide a little more than just a civil award between competitors. If you follow the obiter from Garden Cottage Foods which hints at individual rememdy, Courage v Crehan should apply?
Suggestions?
Regulation 1/2003
Unfortunately it's in Austrlia.
Try it here, I dare you.
Matt