I have 2 copies of NT 4.0 and a copy of W2K FOR SALE!!
If M$ want to take us to court on this be our guest!!!! These are legit copies... NT4 were never opened and the W2K - well - we couldn't get it running properly.
I'm sure some/.'ers might want them. Open to offers... willing to sell at cost. The W2K for instance - offer $100 bux and its yours.
Legit? Yup. Bought NT4 as part of a 3 pack from Merisel (we're a dealer). M$ will not allow us an exchange into 2K. Bought the W2K OS for a client who is an artist. After weeks of work we found the years of incompatibilities in M$ crap caught us. We couldn't get her cards to work. So W2K was dumped and she's still on w95. Go figure!
So the stuff is for sale and my experiance is that our breif foray into selling M$ products was a nightmare. It just cost us money! We don't sell or even recomend M$ products anymore.
I read somewhere that potatoes an Tomatoes are capabile of being grafted onto each other. Now I don't think there would be much use for a plant with a tomatoe bottom and a potatoe top - but how about a potatoe bottom and a tomatoe top?
I'd love to try it!!! Especially with some nice exotic spuds that already taste buttered!!! Does anyone have any information on how to go about something like this?
The electical untilities were in this situation in the 70's. Small producers - perhaps people in a windy spot or someone with a creek wanted to pump electricity into the grid. Most didn't really have huge commercial interests... they just wanted to help the planet and conserve our non-renewable fossil fuels.
They were fought - and they won. In many if not most areas - if someone wants to generate _most_ of their electricity from say a windmill, then they will pay a connect fee to the grid and when they draw from the grid they pay at retail rates. If they have surplus they feed it into the grid and THEY ARE PAID - often at full retail rates because the powers that be deem this to be a desirable thing.
No one should decide who. It can be as simple as moniting the size of the pipe from the webservers. If the demand to your servers is handled by a 56K modem - don't expect to be paid. If the demand from your severs requires T1... then you should get a free T1 and your uplink should pay you the same as what they would pay say Sprintlink if they were to suck your content from them.
Suppose you need T3? If your web sites are so popular that a T3 is needed - then you might get $30,000 per month. If say Sprintlink is sucking T3 from your webservers then they are feeding same to their downlinks and they are going to make a tidy profit on this. Anything they pay to their content suppliers they mark up. So if they pay say $30,000 per month for the feeds from the webservers then they will bill the aggregate consumers of that bandwidth probably at least $45,000.
No one needs to decide - measure strictly on volumes. Then give everyone freedom to bid on who they want to have on board. If your content is really special - then let your potential uplinks bid for the connection. The market will sort itself out.
I see no more difficulty with 50,000 web masters vieing for the attention of the surfing public than I see with 50,000 chicken farmers vieing for the opportunity to put their eggs on your breakfast plate. What I have a problem with is large vested interests typically born of a protected monopoly each telling the chicken farmer that if his eggs are so great, then pay them for the delivery service and organise your own way to send a bill to the consumer.
Web content is a commodity. If slashdot web content is great then people will beat a path to their door and they deserve to profit from this so they can do more good work. Success and a service to the public should not be met with killer bills.
The surfing public in good faith have paid their ISP's and the ISP's (at least mine) have been quite diligent paying the telcos (in my case it is Telus)... because they know that if they don't they'll be disconnected.
I am certain that Telus spends millions for the access to the backbone. Here is a simple point in economics... in general the direction of the flow of money is opposite the direction of the flow of goods and services. So I will ask again: Upon what criteria does the direction of the flow of money suddenly reverse itself?
The question posed by you, Spudnic, is upon what critera should webmasters be compensated? I will retort this way: upon what criteria should they NOT be compensated and who should decide this?
I will offer my opinion and ask others who know more than I do to clarify some issues.
I am under the impression that high profile websites like www.slashdot.org would be paid by their uplinks for the bandwidth they require. What I am hearing in the posts within is that VALinux has been funding us.
I have heard from sources I trust that companies like Microsoft and CNN are paid for at _LEAST_ the bandwidth required to feed their content into the net and that the companies who pay them are the telecomunications companies that need content to satisfy their customer base - IE.. ISP's.
I know my ISP for instance pays the Telephone company in this area, and I am certain that my Telephone company in turn pays their uplink (which I believe is sprintlink) for the bandwidth that is required to carry the content that I for instance wish to look at. I do know for a fact that I certainly pay my ISP.
Now www.slashdot.org provides content and this content as we all know requires bandwidth to be delivered. Since my Telephone Company does NOT have a direct connect to the slashdot servers the only way they can get access to this content is to _PAY_ for bandwidth to connect to the people who have a connection to the slashdot servers.
My reasoning is that if my Telephone Company for instance were to find it cheaper to do a direct connect to the SlashDot servers that they could then channel the money they save directly over to the slashdot webmasters and it wouldn't cost them a cent.
But the question in my mind is this... It appears that the content goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -> mytelco -> myisp -> me
and the money goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -< mytelco -< myisp -< me
To me this seems screwed up. Everyone in this picture who delivers content to the consumer is being paid for the service they provide, with the exception of the people who create it.
If the content creators are not paid, then the content will dry up. Of course there will always be tax payer funded content on the net and advertiser funded content and of course corporate interest content. But the type of content most of us want will dry up. I guess at that point we will have to decide whether we wish to continue to pay our ISP's for the bandwidth we no longer use and they in turn will have to decide whether they need as much bandwidth from their uplinks. Could this be why the telephone industry has cancelled its orders for fibre and equipment which has resulted in belt tightening at Corning and Nortel?
My suggestion is that if VALinux should be paid for at least the bandwidth required to deliever the content they make avaialble. This should not come from a subscription - this should come from their uplink because I for instance have already paid my ISP in good faith and they in turn pay a lot of money per month to the telephone company they connect through.
I just installed 0.9.3 There is a LOT there that looks really good. I see some very very excellent ideas in this browser and I personally will switch to it as soon as the performance gets up to par. Nevertheless I'm aghast at the TERRIBLE performance.
I can see where some of this comes from... Part of it is the user interface. There is a generic level of abstraction here that takes a LOT of CPU time and memory. I agree with the abstraction but I can not for the life of me understand why it should literally take SECONDS in some cases for a mouse click to be resolved to a specific function.
At worst - in a given window if even a 1000 separate functions could be selected - then even a linear search through 1000 fields should be instant. These machines run at millions of instructions per second. There is no excuse here other than sloppy coding. An indexed search should take milliseconds. Clean up the GUI first.
Next threading. People typically open GOBS of windows. A separate thread should handle each window IMHO. I can see activities in one window blocking another. I think the underlying reason is that the underlying rendering code is not thread safe. This is my guess - but if so the project will really suffer until this problem is rectified.
Memory management. It looks to me that there is no attention to collecting the memory associated with a given window. It looks to me that 1000's of tiny objects are being malloc()ed with the result that the memory for one page will be interspearsed with the 1000's of tiny objects malloc()ed with other pages.
If 90% of the memory in a given page is malloc()ed for an idle window - and only a single tiny object is malloc()ed for the active window or controlling code - then that page can not be swapped. Effectively inattention to memory management in a browser that opens literally dosens of windows means that the virtual memory subsystem of the computer is neutered.
In addition - malloc()ing 1000's of tiny ojects with the default malloc routines found in systems like Linux is not IMHO a good idea.
The ususal malloc() code searchs for similar sized "holes" which means that (1) it burns a lot of unnecessary CPU and (2) it prohibits the OS from paging the majority of the memory used for idle windows because this memory gets allocated like someone shuffling a deck of cards where each suit represents the memory for a given window. (if you want to use the card deck as an example - then think of 4 windows and 4 suits. If you have 8 windows - then think of 2 decks, etc). A much better idea is to collect the cards in each suit into their own pile and KEEP THE PILES SEPARATE.
There are leaks - but when a window is closed the leaks from the code that malloc()ed ram for the said page is not freed. How can threading be accomplished and how can working with the virtual memory system of the OS be accomodated when memory is allocated amoung all pages like someone shuffling a deck of cards? IMHO this is an area where HUGE performance improvements can be gained.
I think the developers need to address (1) how threading can be layered into the system so that a single thread runs a given window - or perhaps a forked process runs a given window depending on the os... and (2) how all memory for a given window - hense given thread can be collected into a group of virtual memory pages associated with only said window/thread - so that the OS can swap them!
This I think means that people are going to need to look at some fundemental structural issues. Solve these issues first. Once a code base that is multithreaded with thread safe subsystems like the rendering engine and GUI engines are in place - then the rest of the system should fall into line. On the other hand - if the structural issues are not addressed - then I can't see how a multi threaded version will ever come about.
I personally think that a multi threaded code base will solve a HUGE pile of problems. If the developers agree - great. If not - well - its your code base and we each are entitled to our opinions. This is just my 2 cents worth here.
I've got experiance with telecommuting - much more than most because I've been doing it for about 20 years. Yep, I'm a consultant. I have worked for a LOT of companies and developed a lot of software. But what I accomplish as a programmer is identical to what a programmer as an employee does - except that typically I was FAR MORE productive. So I got paid more.
Do I hire consultants? Yes. Do they come into my offices? No. Do I really care where they are located? No. Would I prefer to hire people as employees and pay them less per hour than consultants? No, I'd prefer to pay more per hour and get better productivity. These are just my personal experiances.
1) What prompted me to be self employed and refuse to accept a "job"? Well - working for a "boss" was never an issue. I had some of the best bosses that a man could look for and these "bosses" have in fact been mentors and in many respects they have been responsible for my success. For one company I interviewed my own "supervisor". The answer to the "why" question is first and foremost "Because I liked the freedom". You need to stand up for what you want.
2) Was it easy? Never. I had to be prepared to tell people that: "No - I'm not interested in a job. I am interested in your project and I'd just love to get it running". Many employers don't appreciate that it often doesn't matter who developes something - what matters is that the job gets done. This mindset was always a problem. The solution was simply that I didn't work for them. There is a LOT of work out there. Pick what you do!
3) Why was I more productive? Well - there are many answers to this. I could work my own hours. I could set up my own work environment. What this meant for instance is that I ran a dual monitor system for software development back in 1990 at a time when 95% of programmers were expected to function with a single head. I never had a constant stream of people constantly bugging me. My office was about 2x as large as what generous employers provided - and I have 12' of bookshelves with ALL my reference material present. At $65 bux per square foot, figure out the cost of a 250 square foot office... My present office is larger.
I had more time available to put into work. One of my clients asked me to clone myself. That is a nice feeling. Consider my time equation. Commute for me was about 20 minutes... not 2 hours. In general this meant that if they wanted a meeting - they could give me a call and I could be there within 1/2 hour. Sometimes this is important - not always. But commute in rush hour was about 3/4 of an hour. So this gave me 2 x 3/4 + lunch which is 2 1/2 hours per day that I could devote to their work which their other people did not have.
4) Advantages for me. I have freedom. I actually did one contract while I was overseas and the client did not know. Well - they did eventually find out... but that was Mid February when it was 20 below and they suggested we pop out for fish and chips. I said I couldn't make it... Not good enough, why? Well - the flight back was 16 hours! I'd been calling them long distance, hitting their servers, hitting my servers. They didn't even suspect for 6 weeks because there was no reason to even see each other face to face. I did not realise until later that they were kind of jealous that while they were slogging it through a Canadian winter it was nice and warm where I was. You can rent a beach house in S.E. Asia for quite reasonable... Malaysia is quite nice in February, and the King Prawns are just to die for. The beer is good too!
I'm a single parent. I was actually in a very special situation, one that very few others would be in - thank God! - and my clients knew and did make allowances. My wife was terminally ill from the time my children were born and needed constant supervision for over 5 years. Hiring a nurse would have involved 16 hours of coverage which would exceed what most employees take home. No way I was going to bust my butt just to see everything I earned evaporate in nursing costs. Telecommute allowed me to be where I was needed.
This meant that I got to raise my kids. Even though I was a single parent my kids were never once in a day care situation. I was there to walk them to school, meet them when the came home. If they wanted to come home for lunch - no problem. How many Dad's can say this? How many working mothers?
I can not believe the stress most people must live under. Pre-school programs. Up before 7am - kids to day care by 7:30, commute to the office... What to do if one has the measles? 8-4:30 in the office. All hell to deal with an after work meeting... Pick up the kids by 5:30, everyone is tired and cranky. Prepare dinner for 6:30, done by 7pm. That is 12 hours folks!!! 12 hours for 7 hours of work punctuated by constant interuptions.
7/12 = 58% efficiency.
Constrast: Out of bed by 7:45. Kids to school for 9 am so start breaky, coffee, walk into the office and start checking emails. By 8:30 kids are up and by 8:45 they are off to school. No interuptions until 3:45 when they bang through the door and scream "I'm home Dad!" as if I didn't know. Just stay off the phone to clients from 3:30 on. They're trying to wrap things up and get out of the office anyway because 1/2 of them are stressed out over getting to the day care/after school in time! Dinner has been cooking since 2:30 - nice pot roast... Kids have eaten by 5:30 and they are doing homework or watching TV. I've got 2-3 more hours I can do productive work if I wish... or take the kids to a speed skating class starting at 6:30. About 1 1/2 hours here are involved with domestic and personal issues - so that means (7 + 1.5) = 8 1/2. 7/8.5 = 82% efficiency.
The biggest single benefit here is stress. Knowledge workers can not be productive when they are under stress. No wonder I could get more work done! If a crunch was comming up - I had an extra 4 hours that I could put in from 7 to 11 pm. And my family life did not suffer as a result.
Bottom Line: In my personal experiance I was able to accomplish more in less time. I got paid more - perhaps 2x per hour what employees were paid, but my clients felt they got better value. I had my freedom. In spite of a horrible personal circumstances where I needed to be a care giver to a very sick spouse, I was able to pursue a very rewarding career. My clients appreciated the extra effort I could put into their work, and they certainly were free at any time to let me go at a moment's notice if they wanted.
Much of my productivity was due to not being too tired to work or too stressed to work. I know that some of the people who read this will have kids in day care and pre/after school programs and either be single parents or be pursuing dual careers. I feel sorry for you!
In closing I will add that one of my best friends is doing the same. Another of my best friends is following a different road and he also did not ask his employer if he could "telecommute". He just quit and set up his own business in competition. I think they are up to 50 people by now. He also supports the freedom model and MOST of the people working with him are freelancers. He encourages this.
It is not so much trying to convince your employers that they should allow "telecommuting". Rather it is taking the bull by the horns and developing the confidence to tell a company that you really do not want to be their employee. If you do excellent work they'll give you what you ask.
IMHO the upstreams should be paying webmasters
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 1
Blocking the transmissions, eh?
Ok - consider this. In order for a telecommunications carrier to be able to supply content to their ISP divisions, as well as the ISP's they support, they need to connect to the backbone - and this means they need to PAY the backbone operator for connection bandwidth.
But webmasters who run small (and sometimes not so small) servers ALSO provide content. However, this group is NOT paid for the services they provide.
Now it gets worse apparently with port 80 being blocked.
Consider this: In order to reduce the bandwidth charges, caching proxies are used. This allows a company like AOL to serve 20 million customers from cached web pages. This is a pretty large saving.
I don't think copyright law gives them this right, any more than a newspaper stand has the right to reprint a newspaper. And by doing this the backbone operators are being deprived of revenues. In turn webmasters are also deprived of revenues.
If it clear that internet content has value. It has a great deal of value just as radio and TV signals have value. Internet content also costs money to create.
Now, for a really small website - the amount we are talking about here likely is chicken feed. But getting this issue resolved about who really owes who for what will go a long way towards at least ensuring that port 80 is not blocked!
Here is a case in point: SlashDot does a wonderful job and they serve 30 million pages a day or so. I am quite happy as a customer of my ISP to pay for their delivery service of SlahDot pages. In order for my ISP to do this they pay the local telecomunications carrier and this company in turn pays their backbone supplier. Now , if instead of the telecomunications carrier obtaining slashDot pages from the backbone operator, suppose they called up the SlashDot people and asked for a direct connection? In this case their bills to the backbone operator would be reduced because presumably a LOT of people read SlashDot. This would mean that at zero additional cost, the same telecomunications carrier can pay something toward the operation of the SlashDot website.
Somehow webmasters in their eagerness to get connected failed to realise that rather than paying for bandwidth to distribute their content, instead they should be paid for the bandwidth the surfing public demands from their servers. Everyone else gets paid when the public accesses content. Protecting the rights of the copyright owner is what the DMCA is all about. Bad law mind you. But the intent to protect copyright is not bad.
The purpose of copyright law is to protect the rights of those who create intellectual property and ensure that they receive compensation in a manner that is fair and consistant with the public's right to use it. Webmasters in general also create intellectual property and in general their works are also copyrighted.
Just as the owner of a movie has the right to decide if it shall be distributed on a for pay basis, such as in a theater, a video, on pay TV; or if it is distibuted on a broadcast basis by the networks, IMHO webmasters shuold ALSO enjoy this choice. This would mean that the ISP side of the business should pay a tarrif to the webmasters if the website is made generally available. If the webmaster chooses to make it a for pay site, well - just like pay TV - so be it.
IMHO this would create a healthy dot.com sector. Everyone will win. Webmasters would NOT receive any income unless people actually chose to surf to their websites. And the carriers would make more money from this as well. Probably we would suddenly find high bandwidth websites that are really entertaining start to develop and this would fuel the adoption of DSL and broadband. The telephone carriers and ISP's would make a lot more money - not less.
Besides, the ISP side of the business is already paying for connection bandwidth. It is just that somewhere in the food chain the money that should presently be flowing into the dot.com sector is being diverted. But - it is not being diverted in all cases because there are some websites that are reciving revenues for what they pump into the net.
Can the Norton folks scan for it too?
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 1
[quote from the artical]
"Through an agreement with Adobe announced in June, McAfee's software is able to scan PDF files,
Gullotto said. However, as with other virus types, the software isn't always able to catch new viruses until its definitions are updated."
Does this mean Adobe can sic the FBI on the Norton programmers and send them off to the can?
Do my eyeballs breach the DMCA if I read an ebook decoded onto my screen? If I use a program that captures the image and places it on a different screen does this breach the DMCA? (IE. VNC or X) If I write program that functions as a virtual screen and saves the output to the disk do I breach the DMCA? Can I call this temporary file a "cache" so that I can claim that copying is not copying - it is caching?
Where do we draw the line? Does it breach the DMCA if a person flips a bit in the memory of the computer which happens to correspond to the "flag" that the reader uses to tell it that it is ok to show the document? Suppose there are 2 or 3 or more flags? When does it become illegal. Remember IBM did this sort of trick to get windoze to run in OS/2. Was Windoze "encrypted" into the binary machine language or "coded" or "compiled"?
Can we call "compiling" a form of "encryption" because the machine code sure looks ugly to me? Can we now throw programmers in jail if they look at machine code?
You can draw the line anywhere you wish depending on who you are, who you represent, what you wish to accomplish and which way the wind is blowing.
What it boils down to IMHO that there is NO difference between encryption and encoding other than if you know the magic it is coded; and if you do not the magic or someone claims you should not know the magic, then it is crypted.
Skylarov just decoded the damn documents. There is no proof they ever were encrypted. Encryption after all is supposed to be secure. Since the methods chosen were not secure, encryption never took place. QED.
How about we get this guy out of the clutches of the evil USA "justice" system and then debate the lint in our collective navels?
Numerical recipes - Press, Flannery,etc. Get the C version
Network Programming (2 books: Networking API's and Interprocess Communications)- Stevens
Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls - Sonnenreich, Yates
SSL adn TLS - Designing and Building secure systems - Rescorla
Writing APACHE Modules with Perl and C - Stein, MacEachern
Red Hat Linux boxed set!!! - Many people are too poor to buy it. Poor people have kids too and these teenagers are left out. A PC can be found for nothing but they won't know where to get the OS. Any other distro will be fine too.
Slashdot Mirror
I have 2 copies of NT 4.0 and a copy of W2K FOR SALE!!
If M$ want to take us to court on this be our guest!!!! These are legit copies... NT4 were never opened and the W2K - well - we couldn't get it running properly.
I'm sure some
Legit? Yup. Bought NT4 as part of a 3 pack from Merisel (we're a dealer). M$ will not allow us an exchange into 2K. Bought the W2K OS for a client who is an artist. After weeks of work we found the years of incompatibilities in M$ crap caught us. We couldn't get her cards to work. So W2K was dumped and she's still on w95. Go figure!
So the stuff is for sale and my experiance is that our breif foray into selling M$ products was a nightmare. It just cost us money! We don't sell or even recomend M$ products anymore.
I read somewhere that potatoes an Tomatoes are capabile of being grafted onto each other. Now I don't think there would be much use for a plant with a tomatoe bottom and a potatoe top - but how about a potatoe bottom and a tomatoe top?
I'd love to try it!!! Especially with some nice exotic spuds that already taste buttered!!! Does anyone have any information on how to go about something like this?
The electical untilities were in this situation in the 70's. Small producers - perhaps people in a windy spot or someone with a creek wanted to pump electricity into the grid. Most didn't really have huge commercial interests... they just wanted to help the planet and conserve our non-renewable fossil fuels.
They were fought - and they won. In many if not most areas - if someone wants to generate _most_ of their electricity from say a windmill, then they will pay a connect fee to the grid and when they draw from the grid they pay at retail rates. If they have surplus they feed it into the grid and THEY ARE PAID - often at full retail rates because the powers that be deem this to be a desirable thing.
No one should decide who. It can be as simple as moniting the size of the pipe from the webservers. If the demand to your servers is handled by a 56K modem - don't expect to be paid. If the demand from your severs requires T1... then you should get a free T1 and your uplink should pay you the same as what they would pay say Sprintlink if they were to suck your content from them.
Suppose you need T3? If your web sites are so popular that a T3 is needed - then you might get $30,000 per month. If say Sprintlink is sucking T3 from your webservers then they are feeding same to their downlinks and they are going to make a tidy profit on this. Anything they pay to their content suppliers they mark up. So if they pay say $30,000 per month for the feeds from the webservers then they will bill the aggregate consumers of that bandwidth probably at least $45,000.
No one needs to decide - measure strictly on volumes. Then give everyone freedom to bid on who they want to have on board. If your content is really special - then let your potential uplinks bid for the connection. The market will sort itself out.
I see no more difficulty with 50,000 web masters vieing for the attention of the surfing public than I see with 50,000 chicken farmers vieing for the opportunity to put their eggs on your breakfast plate. What I have a problem with is large vested interests typically born of a protected monopoly each telling the chicken farmer that if his eggs are so great, then pay them for the delivery service and organise your own way to send a bill to the consumer.
Web content is a commodity. If slashdot web content is great then people will beat a path to their door and they deserve to profit from this so they can do more good work. Success and a service to the public should not be met with killer bills.
The surfing public in good faith have paid their ISP's and the ISP's (at least mine) have been quite diligent paying the telcos (in my case it is Telus)... because they know that if they don't they'll be disconnected.
I am certain that Telus spends millions for the access to the backbone. Here is a simple point in economics... in general the direction of the flow of money is opposite the direction of the flow of goods and services. So I will ask again: Upon what criteria does the direction of the flow of money suddenly reverse itself?
The question posed by you, Spudnic, is upon what critera should webmasters be compensated? I will retort this way: upon what criteria should they NOT be compensated and who should decide this?
I will offer my opinion and ask others who know more than I do to clarify some issues.
I am under the impression that high profile websites like www.slashdot.org would be paid by their uplinks for the bandwidth they require. What I am hearing in the posts within is that VALinux has been funding us.
I have heard from sources I trust that companies like Microsoft and CNN are paid for at _LEAST_ the bandwidth required to feed their content into the net and that the companies who pay them are the telecomunications companies that need content to satisfy their customer base - IE.. ISP's.
I know my ISP for instance pays the Telephone company in this area, and I am certain that my Telephone company in turn pays their uplink (which I believe is sprintlink) for the bandwidth that is required to carry the content that I for instance wish to look at. I do know for a fact that I certainly pay my ISP.
Now www.slashdot.org provides content and this content as we all know requires bandwidth to be delivered. Since my Telephone Company does NOT have a direct connect to the slashdot servers the only way they can get access to this content is to _PAY_ for bandwidth to connect to the people who have a connection to the slashdot servers.
My reasoning is that if my Telephone Company for instance were to find it cheaper to do a direct connect to the SlashDot servers that they could then channel the money they save directly over to the slashdot webmasters and it wouldn't cost them a cent.
But the question in my mind is this... It appears that the content goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -> mytelco -> myisp -> me
and the money goes like this:
slashdot -> backbone-cloud -< mytelco -< myisp -< me
To me this seems screwed up. Everyone in this picture who delivers content to the consumer is being paid for the service they provide, with the exception of the people who create it.
If the content creators are not paid, then the content will dry up. Of course there will always be tax payer funded content on the net and advertiser funded content and of course corporate interest content. But the type of content most of us want will dry up. I guess at that point we will have to decide whether we wish to continue to pay our ISP's for the bandwidth we no longer use and they in turn will have to decide whether they need as much bandwidth from their uplinks. Could this be why the telephone industry has cancelled its orders for fibre and equipment which has resulted in belt tightening at Corning and Nortel?
My suggestion is that if VALinux should be paid for at least the bandwidth required to deliever the content they make avaialble. This should not come from a subscription - this should come from their uplink because I for instance have already paid my ISP in good faith and they in turn pay a lot of money per month to the telephone company they connect through.
I just installed 0.9.3 There is a LOT there that looks really good. I see some very very excellent ideas in this browser and I personally will switch to it as soon as the performance gets up to par. Nevertheless I'm aghast at the TERRIBLE performance.
I can see where some of this comes from... Part of it is the user interface. There is a generic level of abstraction here that takes a LOT of CPU time and memory. I agree with the abstraction but I can not for the life of me understand why it should literally take SECONDS in some cases for a mouse click to be resolved to a specific function.
At worst - in a given window if even a 1000 separate functions could be selected - then even a linear search through 1000 fields should be instant. These machines run at millions of instructions per second. There is no excuse here other than sloppy coding. An indexed search should take milliseconds. Clean up the GUI first.
Next threading. People typically open GOBS of windows. A separate thread should handle each window IMHO. I can see activities in one window blocking another. I think the underlying reason is that the underlying rendering code is not thread safe. This is my guess - but if so the project will really suffer until this problem is rectified.
Memory management. It looks to me that there is no attention to collecting the memory associated with a given window. It looks to me that 1000's of tiny objects are being malloc()ed with the result that the memory for one page will be interspearsed with the 1000's of tiny objects malloc()ed with other pages.
If 90% of the memory in a given page is malloc()ed for an idle window - and only a single tiny object is malloc()ed for the active window or controlling code - then that page can not be swapped. Effectively inattention to memory management in a browser that opens literally dosens of windows means that the virtual memory subsystem of the computer is neutered.
In addition - malloc()ing 1000's of tiny ojects with the default malloc routines found in systems like Linux is not IMHO a good idea.
The ususal malloc() code searchs for similar sized "holes" which means that (1) it burns a lot of unnecessary CPU and (2) it prohibits the OS from paging the majority of the memory used for idle windows because this memory gets allocated like someone shuffling a deck of cards where each suit represents the memory for a given window. (if you want to use the card deck as an example - then think of 4 windows and 4 suits. If you have 8 windows - then think of 2 decks, etc). A much better idea is to collect the cards in each suit into their own pile and KEEP THE PILES SEPARATE.
There are leaks - but when a window is closed the leaks from the code that malloc()ed ram for the said page is not freed. How can threading be accomplished and how can working with the virtual memory system of the OS be accomodated when memory is allocated amoung all pages like someone shuffling a deck of cards? IMHO this is an area where HUGE performance improvements can be gained.
I think the developers need to address (1) how threading can be layered into the system so that a single thread runs a given window - or perhaps a forked process runs a given window depending on the os... and (2) how all memory for a given window - hense given thread can be collected into a group of virtual memory pages associated with only said window/thread - so that the OS can swap them!
This I think means that people are going to need to look at some fundemental structural issues. Solve these issues first. Once a code base that is multithreaded with thread safe subsystems like the rendering engine and GUI engines are in place - then the rest of the system should fall into line. On the other hand - if the structural issues are not addressed - then I can't see how a multi threaded version will ever come about.
I personally think that a multi threaded code base will solve a HUGE pile of problems. If the developers agree - great. If not - well - its your code base and we each are entitled to our opinions. This is just my 2 cents worth here.
I've got experiance with telecommuting - much more than most because I've been doing it for about 20 years. Yep, I'm a consultant. I have worked for a LOT of companies and developed a lot of software. But what I accomplish as a programmer is identical to what a programmer as an employee does - except that typically I was FAR MORE productive. So I got paid more.
Do I hire consultants? Yes. Do they come into my offices? No. Do I really care where they are located? No. Would I prefer to hire people as employees and pay them less per hour than consultants? No, I'd prefer to pay more per hour and get better productivity. These are just my personal experiances.
1) What prompted me to be self employed and refuse to accept a "job"? Well - working for a "boss" was never an issue. I had some of the best bosses that a man could look for and these "bosses" have in fact been mentors and in many respects they have been responsible for my success. For one company I interviewed my own "supervisor". The answer to the "why" question is first and foremost "Because I liked the freedom". You need to stand up for what you want.
2) Was it easy? Never. I had to be prepared to tell people that: "No - I'm not interested in a job. I am interested in your project and I'd just love to get it running". Many employers don't appreciate that it often doesn't matter who developes something - what matters is that the job gets done. This mindset was always a problem. The solution was simply that I didn't work for them. There is a LOT of work out there. Pick what you do!
3) Why was I more productive? Well - there are many answers to this. I could work my own hours. I could set up my own work environment. What this meant for instance is that I ran a dual monitor system for software development back in 1990 at a time when 95% of programmers were expected to function with a single head. I never had a constant stream of people constantly bugging me. My office was about 2x as large as what generous employers provided - and I have 12' of bookshelves with ALL my reference material present. At $65 bux per square foot, figure out the cost of a 250 square foot office... My present office is larger.
I had more time available to put into work. One of my clients asked me to clone myself. That is a nice feeling. Consider my time equation. Commute for me was about 20 minutes... not 2 hours. In general this meant that if they wanted a meeting - they could give me a call and I could be there within 1/2 hour. Sometimes this is important - not always. But commute in rush hour was about 3/4 of an hour. So this gave me 2 x 3/4 + lunch which is 2 1/2 hours per day that I could devote to their work which their other people did not have.
4) Advantages for me. I have freedom. I actually did one contract while I was overseas and the client did not know. Well - they did eventually find out... but that was Mid February when it was 20 below and they suggested we pop out for fish and chips. I said I couldn't make it... Not good enough, why? Well - the flight back was 16 hours! I'd been calling them long distance, hitting their servers, hitting my servers. They didn't even suspect for 6 weeks because there was no reason to even see each other face to face. I did not realise until later that they were kind of jealous that while they were slogging it through a Canadian winter it was nice and warm where I was. You can rent a beach house in S.E. Asia for quite reasonable... Malaysia is quite nice in February, and the King Prawns are just to die for. The beer is good too!
I'm a single parent. I was actually in a very special situation, one that very few others would be in - thank God! - and my clients knew and did make allowances. My wife was terminally ill from the time my children were born and needed constant supervision for over 5 years. Hiring a nurse would have involved 16 hours of coverage which would exceed what most employees take home. No way I was going to bust my butt just to see everything I earned evaporate in nursing costs. Telecommute allowed me to be where I was needed.
This meant that I got to raise my kids. Even though I was a single parent my kids were never once in a day care situation. I was there to walk them to school, meet them when the came home. If they wanted to come home for lunch - no problem. How many Dad's can say this? How many working mothers?
I can not believe the stress most people must live under. Pre-school programs. Up before 7am - kids to day care by 7:30, commute to the office... What to do if one has the measles? 8-4:30 in the office. All hell to deal with an after work meeting... Pick up the kids by 5:30, everyone is tired and cranky. Prepare dinner for 6:30, done by 7pm. That is 12 hours folks!!! 12 hours for 7 hours of work punctuated by constant interuptions.
7/12 = 58% efficiency.
Constrast: Out of bed by 7:45. Kids to school for 9 am so start breaky, coffee, walk into the office and start checking emails. By 8:30 kids are up and by 8:45 they are off to school. No interuptions until 3:45 when they bang through the door and scream "I'm home Dad!" as if I didn't know. Just stay off the phone to clients from 3:30 on. They're trying to wrap things up and get out of the office anyway because 1/2 of them are stressed out over getting to the day care/after school in time! Dinner has been cooking since 2:30 - nice pot roast... Kids have eaten by 5:30 and they are doing homework or watching TV. I've got 2-3 more hours I can do productive work if I wish... or take the kids to a speed skating class starting at 6:30. About 1 1/2 hours here are involved with domestic and personal issues - so that means (7 + 1.5) = 8 1/2. 7/8.5 = 82% efficiency.
The biggest single benefit here is stress. Knowledge workers can not be productive when they are under stress. No wonder I could get more work done! If a crunch was comming up - I had an extra 4 hours that I could put in from 7 to 11 pm. And my family life did not suffer as a result.
Bottom Line: In my personal experiance I was able to accomplish more in less time. I got paid more - perhaps 2x per hour what employees were paid, but my clients felt they got better value. I had my freedom. In spite of a horrible personal circumstances where I needed to be a care giver to a very sick spouse, I was able to pursue a very rewarding career. My clients appreciated the extra effort I could put into their work, and they certainly were free at any time to let me go at a moment's notice if they wanted.
Much of my productivity was due to not being too tired to work or too stressed to work. I know that some of the people who read this will have kids in day care and pre/after school programs and either be single parents or be pursuing dual careers. I feel sorry for you!
In closing I will add that one of my best friends is doing the same. Another of my best friends is following a different road and he also did not ask his employer if he could "telecommute". He just quit and set up his own business in competition. I think they are up to 50 people by now. He also supports the freedom model and MOST of the people working with him are freelancers. He encourages this.
It is not so much trying to convince your employers that they should allow "telecommuting". Rather it is taking the bull by the horns and developing the confidence to tell a company that you really do not want to be their employee. If you do excellent work they'll give you what you ask.
Blocking the transmissions, eh?
Ok - consider this. In order for a telecommunications carrier to be able to supply content to their ISP divisions, as well as the ISP's they support, they need to connect to the backbone - and this means they need to PAY the backbone operator for connection bandwidth.
But webmasters who run small (and sometimes not so small) servers ALSO provide content. However, this group is NOT paid for the services they provide.
Now it gets worse apparently with port 80 being blocked.
Consider this: In order to reduce the bandwidth charges, caching proxies are used. This allows a company like AOL to serve 20 million customers from cached web pages. This is a pretty large saving.
I don't think copyright law gives them this right, any more than a newspaper stand has the right to reprint a newspaper. And by doing this the backbone operators are being deprived of revenues. In turn webmasters are also deprived of revenues.
If it clear that internet content has value. It has a great deal of value just as radio and TV signals have value. Internet content also costs money to create.
Now, for a really small website - the amount we are talking about here likely is chicken feed. But getting this issue resolved about who really owes who for what will go a long way towards at least ensuring that port 80 is not blocked!
Here is a case in point: SlashDot does a wonderful job and they serve 30 million pages a day or so. I am quite happy as a customer of my ISP to pay for their delivery service of SlahDot pages. In order for my ISP to do this they pay the local telecomunications carrier and this company in turn pays their backbone supplier. Now , if instead of the telecomunications carrier obtaining slashDot pages from the backbone operator, suppose they called up the SlashDot people and asked for a direct connection? In this case their bills to the backbone operator would be reduced because presumably a LOT of people read SlashDot. This would mean that at zero additional cost, the same telecomunications carrier can pay something toward the operation of the SlashDot website.
Somehow webmasters in their eagerness to get connected failed to realise that rather than paying for bandwidth to distribute their content, instead they should be paid for the bandwidth the surfing public demands from their servers. Everyone else gets paid when the public accesses content. Protecting the rights of the copyright owner is what the DMCA is all about. Bad law mind you. But the intent to protect copyright is not bad.
The purpose of copyright law is to protect the rights of those who create intellectual property and ensure that they receive compensation in a manner that is fair and consistant with the public's right to use it. Webmasters in general also create intellectual property and in general their works are also copyrighted.
Just as the owner of a movie has the right to decide if it shall be distributed on a for pay basis, such as in a theater, a video, on pay TV; or if it is distibuted on a broadcast basis by the networks, IMHO webmasters shuold ALSO enjoy this choice. This would mean that the ISP side of the business should pay a tarrif to the webmasters if the website is made generally available. If the webmaster chooses to make it a for pay site, well - just like pay TV - so be it.
IMHO this would create a healthy dot.com sector. Everyone will win. Webmasters would NOT receive any income unless people actually chose to surf to their websites. And the carriers would make more money from this as well. Probably we would suddenly find high bandwidth websites that are really entertaining start to develop and this would fuel the adoption of DSL and broadband. The telephone carriers and ISP's would make a lot more money - not less.
Besides, the ISP side of the business is already paying for connection bandwidth. It is just that somewhere in the food chain the money that should presently be flowing into the dot.com sector is being diverted. But - it is not being diverted in all cases because there are some websites that are reciving revenues for what they pump into the net.
"Through an agreement with Adobe announced in June, McAfee's software is able to scan PDF files, Gullotto said. However, as with other virus types, the software isn't always able to catch new viruses until its definitions are updated."
Does this mean Adobe can sic the FBI on the Norton programmers and send them off to the can?
Do my eyeballs breach the DMCA if I read an ebook decoded onto my screen? If I use a program that captures the image and places it on a different screen does this breach the DMCA? (IE. VNC or X) If I write program that functions as a virtual screen and saves the output to the disk do I breach the DMCA? Can I call this temporary file a "cache" so that I can claim that copying is not copying - it is caching? Where do we draw the line? Does it breach the DMCA if a person flips a bit in the memory of the computer which happens to correspond to the "flag" that the reader uses to tell it that it is ok to show the document? Suppose there are 2 or 3 or more flags? When does it become illegal. Remember IBM did this sort of trick to get windoze to run in OS/2. Was Windoze "encrypted" into the binary machine language or "coded" or "compiled"? Can we call "compiling" a form of "encryption" because the machine code sure looks ugly to me? Can we now throw programmers in jail if they look at machine code? You can draw the line anywhere you wish depending on who you are, who you represent, what you wish to accomplish and which way the wind is blowing. What it boils down to IMHO that there is NO difference between encryption and encoding other than if you know the magic it is coded; and if you do not the magic or someone claims you should not know the magic, then it is crypted. Skylarov just decoded the damn documents. There is no proof they ever were encrypted. Encryption after all is supposed to be secure. Since the methods chosen were not secure, encryption never took place. QED. How about we get this guy out of the clutches of the evil USA "justice" system and then debate the lint in our collective navels?
Numerical recipes - Press, Flannery,etc. Get the C version Network Programming (2 books: Networking API's and Interprocess Communications)- Stevens Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls - Sonnenreich, Yates SSL adn TLS - Designing and Building secure systems - Rescorla Writing APACHE Modules with Perl and C - Stein, MacEachern Red Hat Linux boxed set!!! - Many people are too poor to buy it. Poor people have kids too and these teenagers are left out. A PC can be found for nothing but they won't know where to get the OS. Any other distro will be fine too.