I agree, dynamic content is very much more challenging - but is it wise for Ace's (or any of the other sites) who are serving up static stories to do so through dynamic methods?
I am familiar with serving dynamic content of very high information density, and let me tell you, Ace's doesn't compare. The data I serve from work
is updated every second; the stories on Ace's (and most other hardware-review sites) change every couple of days.
When one of the sites that I serve, The Computer History Simulation Project, was slashdotted, I was serving 40-50 pages per second (which is nearly ten times the rate attributed to Ace's Hardware) on a 4-year-old webserver (a K6II-500) that cost about $200 to put together. And the server itself was ticking along with only a few percent CPU usage.
OTOH, my puny little SDSL connection was seriously maxed out.
Even old hardware can happily serve up hundreds of documents a second, if the pages are static.
This sort of subject has been around for years,
and gets rediscovered every so often, by a "new" generation of hackers. (Look, for instance, at the big deal made about Duff's Device when C came along.) The problem is, that implementations of these ideas are often non-portable. (To other architectures, languages, or even the next version of the compiler.)
That's not to say that I don't enjoy reading about these clever things; there is a lot to be learned by studying this stuff. But implementing them is usually a mistake these days, if for no other reason than because there's already a portable way to do it which is probably more efficient. To go back to the Duff's Device example, almost all compilers will implement loop unrolling already. And that's a C-language trick, supposedly already a high-level language. Note I said supposedly!:-)
Several decades ago, car manufacturers tried to "lock out" other companies from making parts for their cars. The reason was obvious: a monopoly on replacement parts. They also wrote the warranties so that only the dealer could do even routine services like oil changes, again guaranteeing a monopoly.
The US Congress reacted by passing the Magnusson-Moss Act. For physical things (specifically cars) this does a pretty good job at allowing aftermarket parts that are compatible with your car and at breaking the dealer's monopoly on service. (Note that there do remain
problems with embedded car computers and service codes!)
What we need is the intellectual property equivalent to the Magnusson-Moss act. We need to be able to buy compatible parts (like garage door remote controls) from other companies. We need to be able to open the hood and figure out interfaces. We need to be able to run or write different new software for boxes we've already bought, and not be locked into a single software vendor. In particular, we need to be able to do these without the fear of getting our asses sued off.
I would throw out 9 of the suggested top 10 list and come up with:
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
Buffer overflows
My list is based on 15 years of watching the industry. Things may change for the better, in that buffer overflows decrease and thus other problems become more clear, but I haven't seen that yet.
It certainly is true that there are more tools and languages out there that make it easier to avoid buffer overflows than there were fifteen years ago. Problem is, most folks are still writing application code just like it was fifteen years ago, with fixed-size buffers and system calls that allow you to overflow them, even when the tools permit far more robust stuff to be done.
Quantum Bigfoots were 5.25" IDE drives made in the mid-to-late-mid-90's. They had an old plant (bought as part of their buyout of DEC's storage division) that only made 5.25" platters and they put them into their large-capacity-but-slow-speed IDE drives.
The best tools - open source or commercial - out there are ones that now have applications far beyond what they were originally designed to do.
The most obvious example is Perl. It was made to generate reports, but grew so far and in so many different directions that few Perl programmers have ever used it to generate printed-page reports.
But open-source isn't just about features. It's about rock-solid reliability *and* portability; few commercial products run on as wide a range of platforms as, say, GNU fileutils. And I can still cause most commercial 'pwd' implementations to dump core, but have never done so with GNU pwd:-)
having more than one internet naming athority could potentially
cause quite a bit of havoc as packets streams get split between two physical destinations
I agree, there would be havoc, but I have no problem with alternate DNS systems existing. If
the advantages are great enough, the competing system will win and the lesser will die out.
I may not agree that Alternic and the other "alternative DNS" systems out there are the better ones, but by their existence they are not depriving anyone of anything.
First of all, you never really "buy" a domain name, it's more like a fixed-term, pay-it-all-up-front lease.
Secondly, I believe that the only "worth" a domain name has is the value that you built it up to.
The original "lessor" got it for free, just kind-of sat on it for nearly two years, and then
the speculation in domain name was just beginning.
(Even in 1996 when it was "stolen" domain name registrations were almost completely non-speculative; look at the way Proctor and Gamble was being ridiculed for registering "diahrea.com" and "femininehygiene.com" in 1995.
In retrospect it's still funny:-) )
Of course, I believe the guy who hijacked the domain did something wrong. But the "value" of the domain name shouldn't relate to how wrong it was - I think all hijackings are equally wrong, whether they're of a big corporate name or sex.com or some guy's personal domain with pictures of his wife and cats.
IMHO: It is theft, and the penalty should be exactly how much it cost to register sex.com in the first place. Which was nothing in 1994, the
year it was first registered. (The fee didn't start until 1996 or 1997, when Network Solutions realized they had vastly underbid the government contract...)
I really like Figure 7 in the paper; you clearly see a 5 to 7 year cycle in the averaged-over-the-year price changes. (Of course, there are smaller cycles that can occur within a year,
but we don't see them in the graph.)
What's most amazing is how many people believe that their boom/bust cycle is the only one - I see at least five in that graph:-)
Going price for a T1 (1.5 Mbps) routed onto the
internet, from a second-tier provider, has been
around the $1000 mark for several years. (OK, it's easy to pay more, but it's hard to pay much
less.) Of
this cost, typically:
$100-$150 per month goes to the telco for the copper pairs. This can actually vary quite a lot, depending on whether it terminates at a central office or has to go out to a ISP's equipment room and the price is closely related to tarrifs that vary state-by-state and sometimes locality-by-locality. Depending on the
exact type of service, this may be a "normal"
telephone pair (as in recent T1-over-SDSL via a single copper pair) or it may have been a special trenching job just
to run the T1 pairs (which probably would've been mucho $ you had to pay up front.)
The rest is for the cost of hooking to
the backbone. Again, this varies quite a bit,
depending on how much oversubscribing your provider does. Some oversubscribe by as much as fifteen to one (this'd be like an airline selling 3000 tickets for a flight on a 737) and have much lower costs than a provider that doesn't oversubscribe at all.
IRS Form SS-8 is the official way to determine what you are. The "Quick 20 questions" isn't
the official demarcation but they are closely related to the questions on the SS-8.
After the IRS has determined what the status is
from the SS-8 you can stick to it or dispute it. Sometimes its nice just to know that they've made their decision one way or the other rather than sit in never-never land.
Here are the IRS guidelines used to determine whether or not an
independent contractor truly is an:
Employee or Contractor?
Workers are generally considered employees if
they:
Must comply with the employer's instructions about work.
Receive training from or at the direction of the employer.
Provide services that are integrated into the business.
Are aided by assistants who are hired, supervised and paid
by the employer.
Have a continuing working relationship with the
employer.
Must follow set hours of work.
Work full time for an employer.
Do their work on the employer's premises.
Must do their work in a sequence set by the employer.
Must submit regular reports to the employer.
Receive payments of regular amounts at set intervals.
Receive payments for business or traveling expenses.
Rely on the employer to furnish tools and materials.
Lack a major investment in the facilities or equipment
used to perform the services.
Cannot make a profit or suffer a loss from their service.
Work for one employer at a time.
Do not offer their services to the general public.
Can be fired by the employer.
May quit work at any time without incurring liability.
Do you get an IRS 1099?(e.g. are you a contractor)
on
Contractors on Salary?
·
· Score: 2
We're all a bit confused by what you've gotten
yourself into. I see three options:
You bid a job for a firm fixed price/firm fixed time. e.g. you promised to do something by a given date for a given amount of money, and you signed a contract saying so. This is a great way to do contract work if you're experienced and can price your jobs competitively and deliver. But since you're asking newbie questions I don't think this is what you've got.
You're a contractor and will get a form 1099
at the end of the tax year. This is possible, but again doesn't sound like what you described.
You're working for a company that does contract work, but will get a W-2 (e.g. you're an employee of a contractor, but not a contractor yourself). In which case you certainly can be salaried, and maybe you've bitten off more than you can chew, but one would hope that the company that's you're working for is a decent one.
this is a great technology that would probably be really usefull in laptop/notebook computers or even really small
desktop (entire computer into the flatpanel display!
but really, serial ports? parallel ports? i'm not too sure that the scsi is going to win them any points either, but
what the hell. they might have well integrated a video controler, an audio controler, and a 9600 baud modem to
boot!
Speaking from an embedded-device perspective, this
is heaven in a tiny package. Forget video and audio, the sync serial ports and ethernet are all I need!
If you're looking at a small desktop (that seems to be the direction of your comments), I think the
Via C3 processor on a mini-ITX board is the direction you ought to go. Works wonderfully with Linux.
The prices asked (a few $10000) aren't too far
out of line for what is essentially a custom-built watch. I don't think that the
self-winding technology is setting the price, just the low production quantities.
For comparison, the
Pulsar, the first digital watch the on the
market, cost $2100. A couple years later
digital watches were under
$20 from Texas Instruments, and just a couple of years
after that TI was out of the watch business because they couldn't compete against
$4 imports.
This isn't saying that self-winding watches will take off in the same way; it's just comparing the prices of mass-production stuff versus very low rate production.
The car analogy at the beginning of the story is
more true than the writer knows. Car manufacturers did attempt to lock car buyers
into extra-pricey dealer service, and the US Congress did react by passing the Magnusson-Moss act. Not only did this "unlock the hood", it also fixed things so that you wouldn't violate the warranty just by doing your own oil change.
Slashdot Mirror
The steps:
- Install Linux
- Connect to the 'net
- Install Apache, configure.
- Set up documents to serve
The only limit when serving static documents to the 'net at large is network bandwidth.It did, when slashdotted. It's since been updated to a VIA C3 at 800 MHz.
No, it's a high-content site without all those frilly graphics and doesn't use dynamic methods to serve up static data. Just dumb-obvious things.
I am familiar with serving dynamic content of very high information density, and let me tell you, Ace's doesn't compare. The data I serve from work is updated every second; the stories on Ace's (and most other hardware-review sites) change every couple of days.
OTOH, my puny little SDSL connection was seriously maxed out.
Even old hardware can happily serve up hundreds of documents a second, if the pages are static.
But you've got to be sure that you don't unroll the loop so much that you go out of your processor's I-cache...
And a programming trick that works *only* in C is hardly a portable one.
Yes. Unrolling a loop is *not* rocket science. Any compiler from the last decade will know how to do it better than you can.
That's not to say that I don't enjoy reading about these clever things; there is a lot to be learned by studying this stuff. But implementing them is usually a mistake these days, if for no other reason than because there's already a portable way to do it which is probably more efficient. To go back to the Duff's Device example, almost all compilers will implement loop unrolling already. And that's a C-language trick, supposedly already a high-level language. Note I said supposedly! :-)
The US Congress reacted by passing the Magnusson-Moss Act. For physical things (specifically cars) this does a pretty good job at allowing aftermarket parts that are compatible with your car and at breaking the dealer's monopoly on service. (Note that there do remain problems with embedded car computers and service codes!)
What we need is the intellectual property equivalent to the Magnusson-Moss act. We need to be able to buy compatible parts (like garage door remote controls) from other companies. We need to be able to open the hood and figure out interfaces. We need to be able to run or write different new software for boxes we've already bought, and not be locked into a single software vendor. In particular, we need to be able to do these without the fear of getting our asses sued off.
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
- Buffer overflows
My list is based on 15 years of watching the industry. Things may change for the better, in that buffer overflows decrease and thus other problems become more clear, but I haven't seen that yet.It certainly is true that there are more tools and languages out there that make it easier to avoid buffer overflows than there were fifteen years ago. Problem is, most folks are still writing application code just like it was fifteen years ago, with fixed-size buffers and system calls that allow you to overflow them, even when the tools permit far more robust stuff to be done.
Quantum Bigfoots were 5.25" IDE drives made in
the mid-to-late-mid-90's. They had an old plant
(bought as part of their buyout of DEC's storage
division) that only made 5.25" platters and they put them into their large-capacity-but-slow-speed IDE drives.
Dave Cutler, architect of RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT. (For better and worse, in that order!)
The Interlisp Editor had an "Undo" function in 1975. See the directory listing here.
The most obvious example is Perl. It was made to generate reports, but grew so far and in so many different directions that few Perl programmers have ever used it to generate printed-page reports.
But open-source isn't just about features. It's about rock-solid reliability *and* portability; few commercial products run on as wide a range of platforms as, say, GNU fileutils. And I can still cause most commercial 'pwd' implementations to dump core, but have never done so with GNU pwd :-)
I agree, there would be havoc, but I have no problem with alternate DNS systems existing. If the advantages are great enough, the competing system will win and the lesser will die out.
I may not agree that Alternic and the other "alternative DNS" systems out there are the better ones, but by their existence they are not depriving anyone of anything.
Secondly, I believe that the only "worth" a domain name has is the value that you built it up to. The original "lessor" got it for free, just kind-of sat on it for nearly two years, and then the speculation in domain name was just beginning. (Even in 1996 when it was "stolen" domain name registrations were almost completely non-speculative; look at the way Proctor and Gamble was being ridiculed for registering "diahrea.com" and "femininehygiene.com" in 1995. In retrospect it's still funny :-) )
Of course, I believe the guy who hijacked the domain did something wrong. But the "value" of the domain name shouldn't relate to how wrong it was - I think all hijackings are equally wrong, whether they're of a big corporate name or sex.com or some guy's personal domain with pictures of his wife and cats.
IMHO: It is theft, and the penalty should be exactly how much it cost to register sex.com in the first place. Which was nothing in 1994, the year it was first registered. (The fee didn't start until 1996 or 1997, when Network Solutions realized they had vastly underbid the government contract...)
What's most amazing is how many people believe that their boom/bust cycle is the only one - I see at least five in that graph :-)
A story used the words "Intellectual" when referring to "Terri Welles" site!
After the IRS has determined what the status is from the SS-8 you can stick to it or dispute it. Sometimes its nice just to know that they've made their decision one way or the other rather than sit in never-never land.
Here are the IRS guidelines used to determine whether or not an independent contractor truly is an: Employee or Contractor? Workers are generally considered employees if they:
- You bid a job for a firm fixed price/firm fixed time. e.g. you promised to do something by a given date for a given amount of money, and you signed a contract saying so. This is a great way to do contract work if you're experienced and can price your jobs competitively and deliver. But since you're asking newbie questions I don't think this is what you've got.
- You're a contractor and will get a form 1099
at the end of the tax year. This is possible, but again doesn't sound like what you described.
- You're working for a company that does contract work, but will get a W-2 (e.g. you're an employee of a contractor, but not a contractor yourself). In which case you certainly can be salaried, and maybe you've bitten off more than you can chew, but one would hope that the company that's you're working for is a decent one.
So what is it?Speaking from an embedded-device perspective, this is heaven in a tiny package. Forget video and audio, the sync serial ports and ethernet are all I need!
If you're looking at a small desktop (that seems to be the direction of your comments), I think the Via C3 processor on a mini-ITX board is the direction you ought to go. Works wonderfully with Linux.
For comparison, the Pulsar, the first digital watch the on the market, cost $2100. A couple years later digital watches were under $20 from Texas Instruments, and just a couple of years after that TI was out of the watch business because they couldn't compete against $4 imports.
This isn't saying that self-winding watches will take off in the same way; it's just comparing the prices of mass-production stuff versus very low rate production.
The car analogy at the beginning of the story is more true than the writer knows. Car manufacturers did attempt to lock car buyers into extra-pricey dealer service, and the US Congress did react by passing the Magnusson-Moss act. Not only did this "unlock the hood", it also fixed things so that you wouldn't violate the warranty just by doing your own oil change.