I'd agree except that most boxen now use some sort of GUI for the admins, though the older and more experienced admins still live in command shells and scripting (automation!)
But the question of what constitutes a "server" is normally a question of hardware capacity, not artificial restrictions imposed by multi-layer bundling. The prices for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Oracle, Sybase, etc. (i.e. both OS and core services) are based on CPU capacity, number of users, and other metrics that have nothing to do with some vague concept of server vs. client. (Plus X-11 and related display technologies reverse the terms anyhow, so they really have no meaning. I prefer digraphs -- data/command comes from here and goes there.)
The add-on modules for most operating systems and products are feature add-ons -- GIS data type package, enhanced application integration/administration packages, developer/compiler package, etc. The only operating system I know of that clips out all the shell scripting, scheduling services, and other components needed to do real work is Windows.
There are no "desktop" or "home" editions of Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, VM/MVS, AS400, or other systems because the concept is irrational. You run the same binaries on a two-way HP-UX desktop as on an 8-32 way SMP server. It's just minor configuration variables that change to tune performance; Microsoft is the only one to try to make you pay for those tweaks.
Or you can download a package that will apply the registry changes and make your desktop act like a "server". To me that just highlights the inanity of the marketting distinctions.
Mozilla and Firefox first so one can leverage XUL.
Otherwise pure W3C.
If the vendor doesn't follow standards, too bad. I've better things to do than tweak stylesheets and generate inefficient image formats to get around browsers that don't display a transparent PNG background.
Guess what? Proper W3C HTML usually renders the same in any browser I've used. Some just lag in supporting standards and end up a bit ugly, but still function fine.
I think there is more behind the scenes than people realize. There have been complaints about unreliable cell coverage and other telecommunications issues filed with the FCC for years. Maybe they're gathering evidence to determine if charges or additional legislation are required.
If that's the case, it's pretty clear why they don't want to release the data: it's evidence.
Is a tractor unit without it's trailer useful? No, but you'd never presume the trailer is part of a semi-tractor transport.
Probably before most Slashdot member's time, but when early machines came out, about all you had was a bootstrap BIOS, CPM, or BASIC ROM monitor. PEEK and POKE ruled the day for those of us who could not afford assemblers.
Give me bare hardware, a bootstrap, and in time it will be useful.
Linus did it. The British grad student who wrote the Amiga-DOS kernel did it. So have many others.
Give me a machine with CD or DVD drive, and I'll show you how useful a bare-bones chunk of metal is.
Someone is bound to say "No way! Microsoft would never..."
But a good businessman covers the possibilities, regardless of how likely they seem. No one would ever accuse Bill Gates or the rest of Microsoft's management team of being incompetent in that regard.
Look at IBM. Once renowned as the biggest and slowest changing organization in the industry, they're now more agile than most, and still huge. Even a bankruptcy or breakup aren't that scary to people who manage such large organizations. If anything, the bumps and pratfalls are kind of expected.
It's hard to do that when it takes years and millions of dollars to deal with one case like SCO, even when it's clear to the industry that they don't have a leg to stand on. At least with the dollars and legal teams behind Novell and IBM it'll eventually be settled once and for all -- hopefully leaving SCO and company wide open for damages.
Another spin I've wondered about is whether Microsoft might be preparing for the possibility of renewed anti-trust investigations and a future breakup. Such a conviction would likely demand that they divest themselves of either Office or Windows, so having Novell ready with a POSIX-compliant OS that runs Mono/.Net, Java, and other key Microsoft applications would be very good for the Microsoft user community.
Novell is already very well prepared and experienced to take up the file, print, and authentication services as well, should that prove necessary.
Are you saying murder should not be prosecuted because the victim can't file a complaint?
I completely fail to understand the arguments about "artistic" or "therapeautic" justifications. There just is no rational argument I've ever read or heard that holds under analysis and consideration.
The only biological "excuse" for paedophelia is a latent instinct to breed before a competitor can do so. Anyone whose hardwired instincts for that are out of control or excessive is physically brain damaged -- literally.
Sometimes it can be corrected like a stroke victim can learn to speak again using a different segment of the brain for speech control, or by singing to exercise a different path of neurons. But I firmly believe the worst cases are incurable and a lifelong danger to society.
Oh, really? Are you saying all the media reports and convictions are fantasy?
The idea of increased reporting is plausible, but when you incorporate the charges of people arrested for picking up child prostitutes, the arrests for major child porn collections, the people charged and locked up for direct physical molestation (with or without cameras to share their "experience" with their "friends"),...
Well, lets just say that the numbers are ugly and getting worse.
Have you ever known a rape victim? Even adults have difficulty dealing with the trauma. Now imagine the impact on a trusting child. We're not talking about something that they "get over", but a lifelong infliction of pain.
That makes no sense. They're perfectly willing to prosecute the most vitriolic KKK members and similar hate-message mongers. What difference the medium?
The header does NOT identify content type in the sense I'm talking about, and anonymous/unsigned traffic bypasses the personal responsibility. As long as leeches and pirates use the torrents, the legitimate uses continue to be hampered.
The only ones affected are the tape monkeys, and their jobs were replaced by robotics years ago.
Twenty years ago satellite ground stations were dropped off up north with nothing more than a big tank of diesel, a power generator, and a fault-resilient or fault-tolerant server, left alone for months at a time.
With modern high speed networks and VPN access, it's often hard to tell the difference between being at work and remote access, other than the environment. Don't forget how much sysadmin work has been offshored to India and other regions, or how many global operations have geographically distributed locations, with staff at each covering the entire globe's sysadmin functions from different time zones.
Your theoretical idea has been possible for over 10 years.
The one flaw with ISP blocking is that the block lists are pretty course-grained sometimes. It's not uncommon for crackers to stash files on a box that aren't referenced by the primary page content, then pass around the undocumented URL's in a "dark net" to share the content. Providers need to have a chance to clean up their infestations and security to get off the block lists in a timely fashion, and the site owners should ALWAYS be notified if their site is accused of illegal content or UCE/SPAM.
Of course if the site owner doesn't do anything, they should be tracked down and prosecuted according to the laws of the nation they live in. Locating a server offshore doesn't absolve anyone of their legal responsibilities in their own country, much as money laundering scams don't free their culprits from prosecution.
There are thousands of creation myths around the world, ranging from Inuit legends of lady who married a dog and eventually giving birth to all life in the oceans to tales of aliens seeding the primordial ooze.
Unless someone can actually prove a theory or myth is true or false, it's believers will not change their mind. What matters is whether they become classroom tyrants trying to push their viewpoint on the whole class.
Personally I don't think the general outline of Biblical creationism disagrees with evolution. I think of it as God influencing quantum dynamics, tweaking genetics through random mutation. Others think of it as the results of systemic randomness, pruned over time by how well an organism fills a niche in the ecosystem. The reality of life is the same either way.
I just wish those who read ancient texts as being literal truth would wake up. At a minimum they were written by humans, translated, edited, and tweaked over centuries or millenia. The odds of the current phrasing being true to the original tales related by those inspired to tell them are very, very small.
You can't even pass a comment through 10-15 "generations" of gossip in the old rumour game. What are the odds of 1000 year old story (50 generations of 20 years) being passed on accurately before it's written down, presuming that every single translation since then has been 100% accurate?
The legal issues of personal privacy, copyright duration, consumer rights, etc. are not so clear cut, and have to be set by individual governments. American businesses need to remember they are but one player on the global market, and their law is not universal.
The *AA are particularly blind to this issue. The US restrictions are not even constitutional in other nations.
Thinking about it, the one hole to the approach is that you're relying on content providers/publishers (including individuals) to be honest about the content of crypto containers. But as the key infrastructure provides identification of the signing encryption authority, that can be used to monitor abuses and automatically choke off those who claim they're sending a media stream or application library, but actually distributing illegal or infectious content.
Caps are the wrong approach. Dynamic traffic management is the only viable option, with priorities set by the time-critical nature of the data.
If BitTorrent protocols carried a data type specifier, perhaps a simple MIME type identifier, then the traffic management facilities might be enhanced to consider that information. It would also be reasonable to implement local BitTorrent cache servers so that when you do a transfer, you're effectively getting most of your data from within the ISP.
If the data file contents are encrypted with public or private keys, you can effectively get a VPN/mesh network of digitial content. Application installers, directory overlays (ala NIS+), etc. Your subscription to the originator provides you the public keys for decrypting the content, either to do an install, local media burn, or direct content access.
I know of and have worked with too many organizations that figure it's just a matter of slapping all the computers in an air-conditioned room. Every watt of waste heat adds to the A/C bill.
Old fashioned water-cooled mainframes and big iron (for it's time) often recirculated the wasted heat into the heating systems of the surrounding buildings. We've known all along how to be more energy efficient, if companies and management would only place the emphasis on the environment in their budgets.
I read a blurb that ST:TAS had been released or was about to be released on DVD. I'll have to rent or borrow a set one of these days (and keep an eye out for sales.) There were a few paperbacks based on them as well, I vaguely remember one about Quetzacoatl (?sp?)
Of course they do. How do you think they get past border security? Except for the home grown ones, of course.
What is the muslim population of the inner cities? The paranoid will label them potential "sleeper agents", and push for an "appropriate" reaction. The military is infamously paranoid, running the most unlikely simulations "just in case." Everyone in the US has to rely on their administration keeping the mentality of the source in mind when considering reports or summaries.
Some law enforcement departments are almost as bad, with jaded officers seeing the same criminal behind every face. Again, everyone has to count on the superiors and coworkers to keep their cohorts grounded in the real world.
Fortunately that is what seems to happen most of the time. The media reports the exceptional cases, but compared to the total population the incidence of corruption and abuse is actually not unsalvabable by any means.
Despite gloomy opinions to the contrary, the majority of people do have a sense of integrity and morality that they hold in common across religious and cultural boundaries. The majority may be silent, but they're not completely blind, either.
Canada smacked the Liberals in the last election for unacceptable issues. The US smacked their leadership the same way. That's kind of the whole point of that democracy thing, isn't it?
I look at it more as long-term ROI. How much have I spent on MS-DOS, Win3.1, WFW, Win95, Win98, WinNT, NT4, Win2K, WinXP... I'm not spending any more on Vista. They still haven't provided POSIX layers worth programming outside their servers, and I'm not interested in the nuts and bolts of yet another API.
Other vendors invest in keeping up with current standards. They compete on the basis of effectively supporting and deploying packages built to those standards. Thousands of industry engineers and senior developers had input to those standards.
As long as they run useful software and play games, I'll keep using their products, but I'm done spending any more for no useful return. Thanks to hardware requirements, even a free copy of Vista would be a negative ROI, because I'd have to bump up my memory at a minimum.
Looks like Stargate is out to compete with Star Trek for the most spinoffs ever.
Someone told me there is another Rocky movie on the way -- I guess if you're going to do one, it has to be soon, eh? Now if Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong would only stop procrastinating...:)
Thought crimes would come into play if people were charged with child abuse because they thought a child beauty-contest winner was cute/viable.
Thought crimes would come into play if there were no media influencing their behaviour. Restricting the influencing material is no difference than restricting website and media content under hate crime laws. "Oh, I'm not actually a racist, I just talk that way." Yeah, right. *spits in contempt*
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If I recall correctly, Bill Gates stated he was trying to emulate IBM back in the '80s. Congratulations!
They've emulated an outdated business model. ;)
I'd agree except that most boxen now use some sort of GUI for the admins, though the older and more experienced admins still live in command shells and scripting (automation!)
But the question of what constitutes a "server" is normally a question of hardware capacity, not artificial restrictions imposed by multi-layer bundling. The prices for AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Oracle, Sybase, etc. (i.e. both OS and core services) are based on CPU capacity, number of users, and other metrics that have nothing to do with some vague concept of server vs. client. (Plus X-11 and related display technologies reverse the terms anyhow, so they really have no meaning. I prefer digraphs -- data/command comes from here and goes there.)
The add-on modules for most operating systems and products are feature add-ons -- GIS data type package, enhanced application integration/administration packages, developer/compiler package, etc. The only operating system I know of that clips out all the shell scripting, scheduling services, and other components needed to do real work is Windows.
There are no "desktop" or "home" editions of Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, VM/MVS, AS400, or other systems because the concept is irrational. You run the same binaries on a two-way HP-UX desktop as on an 8-32 way SMP server. It's just minor configuration variables that change to tune performance; Microsoft is the only one to try to make you pay for those tweaks.
Or you can download a package that will apply the registry changes and make your desktop act like a "server". To me that just highlights the inanity of the marketting distinctions.
Mozilla and Firefox first so one can leverage XUL.
Otherwise pure W3C.
If the vendor doesn't follow standards, too bad. I've better things to do than tweak stylesheets and generate inefficient image formats to get around browsers that don't display a transparent PNG background.
Guess what? Proper W3C HTML usually renders the same in any browser I've used. Some just lag in supporting standards and end up a bit ugly, but still function fine.
Could it be that Microsoft is flooding the patent office with junk patents just to prove how incompetent they are so that the system gets revamped?
I think there is more behind the scenes than people realize. There have been complaints about unreliable cell coverage and other telecommunications issues filed with the FCC for years. Maybe they're gathering evidence to determine if charges or additional legislation are required.
If that's the case, it's pretty clear why they don't want to release the data: it's evidence.
Is a tractor unit without it's trailer useful? No, but you'd never presume the trailer is part of a semi-tractor transport.
Probably before most Slashdot member's time, but when early machines came out, about all you had was a bootstrap BIOS, CPM, or BASIC ROM monitor. PEEK and POKE ruled the day for those of us who could not afford assemblers.
Give me bare hardware, a bootstrap, and in time it will be useful.
Linus did it. The British grad student who wrote the Amiga-DOS kernel did it. So have many others.
Give me a machine with CD or DVD drive, and I'll show you how useful a bare-bones chunk of metal is.
Someone is bound to say "No way! Microsoft would never..."
But a good businessman covers the possibilities, regardless of how likely they seem. No one would ever accuse Bill Gates or the rest of Microsoft's management team of being incompetent in that regard.
Look at IBM. Once renowned as the biggest and slowest changing organization in the industry, they're now more agile than most, and still huge. Even a bankruptcy or breakup aren't that scary to people who manage such large organizations. If anything, the bumps and pratfalls are kind of expected.
It's hard to do that when it takes years and millions of dollars to deal with one case like SCO, even when it's clear to the industry that they don't have a leg to stand on. At least with the dollars and legal teams behind Novell and IBM it'll eventually be settled once and for all -- hopefully leaving SCO and company wide open for damages.
Another spin I've wondered about is whether Microsoft might be preparing for the possibility of renewed anti-trust investigations and a future breakup. Such a conviction would likely demand that they divest themselves of either Office or Windows, so having Novell ready with a POSIX-compliant OS that runs Mono/.Net, Java, and other key Microsoft applications would be very good for the Microsoft user community.
Novell is already very well prepared and experienced to take up the file, print, and authentication services as well, should that prove necessary.
Time will tell...
Are you saying murder should not be prosecuted because the victim can't file a complaint?
I completely fail to understand the arguments about "artistic" or "therapeautic" justifications. There just is no rational argument I've ever read or heard that holds under analysis and consideration.
Nonsense.
The only biological "excuse" for paedophelia is a latent instinct to breed before a competitor can do so. Anyone whose hardwired instincts for that are out of control or excessive is physically brain damaged -- literally.
Sometimes it can be corrected like a stroke victim can learn to speak again using a different segment of the brain for speech control, or by singing to exercise a different path of neurons. But I firmly believe the worst cases are incurable and a lifelong danger to society.
Oh, really? Are you saying all the media reports and convictions are fantasy?
The idea of increased reporting is plausible, but when you incorporate the charges of people arrested for picking up child prostitutes, the arrests for major child porn collections, the people charged and locked up for direct physical molestation (with or without cameras to share their "experience" with their "friends"), ...
Well, lets just say that the numbers are ugly and getting worse.
Have you ever known a rape victim? Even adults have difficulty dealing with the trauma. Now imagine the impact on a trusting child. We're not talking about something that they "get over", but a lifelong infliction of pain.
That makes no sense. They're perfectly willing to prosecute the most vitriolic KKK members and similar hate-message mongers. What difference the medium?
The header does NOT identify content type in the sense I'm talking about, and anonymous/unsigned traffic bypasses the personal responsibility. As long as leeches and pirates use the torrents, the legitimate uses continue to be hampered.
The only ones affected are the tape monkeys, and their jobs were replaced by robotics years ago.
Twenty years ago satellite ground stations were dropped off up north with nothing more than a big tank of diesel, a power generator, and a fault-resilient or fault-tolerant server, left alone for months at a time.
With modern high speed networks and VPN access, it's often hard to tell the difference between being at work and remote access, other than the environment. Don't forget how much sysadmin work has been offshored to India and other regions, or how many global operations have geographically distributed locations, with staff at each covering the entire globe's sysadmin functions from different time zones.
Your theoretical idea has been possible for over 10 years.
The one flaw with ISP blocking is that the block lists are pretty course-grained sometimes. It's not uncommon for crackers to stash files on a box that aren't referenced by the primary page content, then pass around the undocumented URL's in a "dark net" to share the content. Providers need to have a chance to clean up their infestations and security to get off the block lists in a timely fashion, and the site owners should ALWAYS be notified if their site is accused of illegal content or UCE/SPAM.
Of course if the site owner doesn't do anything, they should be tracked down and prosecuted according to the laws of the nation they live in. Locating a server offshore doesn't absolve anyone of their legal responsibilities in their own country, much as money laundering scams don't free their culprits from prosecution.
There are thousands of creation myths around the world, ranging from Inuit legends of lady who married a dog and eventually giving birth to all life in the oceans to tales of aliens seeding the primordial ooze.
Unless someone can actually prove a theory or myth is true or false, it's believers will not change their mind. What matters is whether they become classroom tyrants trying to push their viewpoint on the whole class.
Personally I don't think the general outline of Biblical creationism disagrees with evolution. I think of it as God influencing quantum dynamics, tweaking genetics through random mutation. Others think of it as the results of systemic randomness, pruned over time by how well an organism fills a niche in the ecosystem. The reality of life is the same either way.
I just wish those who read ancient texts as being literal truth would wake up. At a minimum they were written by humans, translated, edited, and tweaked over centuries or millenia. The odds of the current phrasing being true to the original tales related by those inspired to tell them are very, very small.
You can't even pass a comment through 10-15 "generations" of gossip in the old rumour game. What are the odds of 1000 year old story (50 generations of 20 years) being passed on accurately before it's written down, presuming that every single translation since then has been 100% accurate?
The legal issues of personal privacy, copyright duration, consumer rights, etc. are not so clear cut, and have to be set by individual governments. American businesses need to remember they are but one player on the global market, and their law is not universal.
The *AA are particularly blind to this issue. The US restrictions are not even constitutional in other nations.
Thinking about it, the one hole to the approach is that you're relying on content providers/publishers (including individuals) to be honest about the content of crypto containers. But as the key infrastructure provides identification of the signing encryption authority, that can be used to monitor abuses and automatically choke off those who claim they're sending a media stream or application library, but actually distributing illegal or infectious content.
Caps are the wrong approach. Dynamic traffic management is the only viable option, with priorities set by the time-critical nature of the data.
If BitTorrent protocols carried a data type specifier, perhaps a simple MIME type identifier, then the traffic management facilities might be enhanced to consider that information. It would also be reasonable to implement local BitTorrent cache servers so that when you do a transfer, you're effectively getting most of your data from within the ISP.
If the data file contents are encrypted with public or private keys, you can effectively get a VPN/mesh network of digitial content. Application installers, directory overlays (ala NIS+), etc. Your subscription to the originator provides you the public keys for decrypting the content, either to do an install, local media burn, or direct content access.
DRM is just hardware acceleration.
I know of and have worked with too many organizations that figure it's just a matter of slapping all the computers in an air-conditioned room. Every watt of waste heat adds to the A/C bill.
Old fashioned water-cooled mainframes and big iron (for it's time) often recirculated the wasted heat into the heating systems of the surrounding buildings. We've known all along how to be more energy efficient, if companies and management would only place the emphasis on the environment in their budgets.
I read a blurb that ST:TAS had been released or was about to be released on DVD. I'll have to rent or borrow a set one of these days (and keep an eye out for sales.) There were a few paperbacks based on them as well, I vaguely remember one about Quetzacoatl (?sp?)
Of course they do. How do you think they get past border security? Except for the home grown ones, of course.
What is the muslim population of the inner cities? The paranoid will label them potential "sleeper agents", and push for an "appropriate" reaction. The military is infamously paranoid, running the most unlikely simulations "just in case." Everyone in the US has to rely on their administration keeping the mentality of the source in mind when considering reports or summaries.
Some law enforcement departments are almost as bad, with jaded officers seeing the same criminal behind every face. Again, everyone has to count on the superiors and coworkers to keep their cohorts grounded in the real world.
Fortunately that is what seems to happen most of the time. The media reports the exceptional cases, but compared to the total population the incidence of corruption and abuse is actually not unsalvabable by any means.
Despite gloomy opinions to the contrary, the majority of people do have a sense of integrity and morality that they hold in common across religious and cultural boundaries. The majority may be silent, but they're not completely blind, either.
Canada smacked the Liberals in the last election for unacceptable issues. The US smacked their leadership the same way. That's kind of the whole point of that democracy thing, isn't it?
I look at it more as long-term ROI. How much have I spent on MS-DOS, Win3.1, WFW, Win95, Win98, WinNT, NT4, Win2K, WinXP... I'm not spending any more on Vista. They still haven't provided POSIX layers worth programming outside their servers, and I'm not interested in the nuts and bolts of yet another API.
Other vendors invest in keeping up with current standards. They compete on the basis of effectively supporting and deploying packages built to those standards. Thousands of industry engineers and senior developers had input to those standards.
As long as they run useful software and play games, I'll keep using their products, but I'm done spending any more for no useful return. Thanks to hardware requirements, even a free copy of Vista would be a negative ROI, because I'd have to bump up my memory at a minimum.
Looks like Stargate is out to compete with Star Trek for the most spinoffs ever.
Someone told me there is another Rocky movie on the way -- I guess if you're going to do one, it has to be soon, eh? Now if Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong would only stop procrastinating... :)
Two words for you: "Bull Shit"
Thought crimes would come into play if people were charged with child abuse because they thought a child beauty-contest winner was cute/viable.
Thought crimes would come into play if there were no media influencing their behaviour. Restricting the influencing material is no difference than restricting website and media content under hate crime laws. "Oh, I'm not actually a racist, I just talk that way." Yeah, right. *spits in contempt*