I suspect (although I have not done the research) that there is quite a bit of prior art for this patent. Unfortunatly digging up configurations for the web servers from 3 years ago may be quite difficult.
Of course what we really need is a documented channel for challenging patents that are too obvious/trivial.
I guess this is as good a time as any for the obligatory "Why are they only looking into infringement opportunities now? Certainly they've seen these kind of server setups popping up all over the place for a couple of years now, why did they wait so long? It must be the money."
First: Have you read the moderator guidelines? I think they clear up a lot of the questions you might have.
Basically, you get moderator points for "good behavior" among other things. This includes posting followups that get moderated up and not followups that get moderated down. You also get points for reading Slashdot x number of times a week where x is neither too small nor too large. Finally, there is a random factor and some stuff Cmdrtaco threw in the code to determine who gets the points.
As for using the points, it will be obvious once you get them (there used to be radio buttons under the article, now there will be pulldown lists). Just select the score you want to assign an article and hit the "Moderate" button on the bottom of the page.
I hope this clears the whole moderation thing up for you.
It might be a good way to read Slashdot when you stop for lunch. Just stop in, read a couple of articles and responses while you eat your burger and fries, and get back to work/on the road in 15 mins. Basically, it's a way to read a newspaper or whatever while you eat.
I'm just worried about the condition of the keyboard/mouse on the computer after thousands of average people surf on them while eating greasy food. They would accumulate keyboard plaque at an alaming rate.
I'm confused why people are so worried about distribution of the trailers. I thought the whole point of the trailers was to advertise the movie, so the more copies of the trailers you have floating around, the more advertising the movie gets. (Like Star Wars needs more advertising). Why would you want to restrict your advertising by prosecuting all of the people who mirror your trailer for free?
I also don't understand the comment in the article about "forstalling" the piracy of the second trailer by having it available only on their website (http://www.starwars.com). I don't see how that forstalls anything (except that their server was completely overloaded and slower than molassass).
With that said, I do agree with him about people who pirate the entire movie. Not only do they steal from Mr. Lucas, but they also tie up a lot of bandwidth that people could otherwise use to read Slashdot.:)
Re:Best of both worlds?
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 1
Ug, that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I for one would not want to be forced to make my program entirely from patches simply because I reused some bit of code from a previous open-source work. I also don't think it is outright stealing when you grab a piece of code from some other project and use it in your current project, in fact I call that code reuse. Of course I'll give credit where it is due, but I don't want to be forced to adopt a license I may not agree with because I reused some code. It's almost as bad a being proprietary. Besides, some of the best software projects around are primarily the works of "forkers" and "theives". Apache for instace.
On a final note, I think trying to create a software licence by a committiee with parties from the FSF and BSD advocates is doomed to a long slow death from conflicting viewpoints.
I doubt it. SGI already has Irix for MIPS, so there is no compelling reason for them to pay to port Linux to MIPS. Linux engineers will probabally be reimplementing a lot of the work SGI did for Irix to get it as as scalable as it is today in Linux. Hopefully they will also be porting xfs to IA86. Imagine if everyone in the world used the same winning filesystem.
That only works if you are only exporting the kernel and not a whole distro. Most of the GNU software was developed in the US AFAIK. Even with distros developed out of the country (S.U.S.E. for example), there is almost certainly more than 10% code from the US in there.
By the way, does anybody know WHY the US has this restriction? Is it part of some sort of embargo? And where did this 10% figure come from?
Re:Where to buy the CD-ROM?
on
*BSD News
·
· Score: 2
Well, you can order the FreeBSD CD direct from Walnut Creek CDROM (the people who sponsor ftp.cdrom.com, maybe you've heard of them). Check out their homepage at http://www.cdrom.com
It is more likely that AOL will develop set-top boxes using Java. I say this for two reasons, 1: Java was originally designed for this sort of thing, 2: AOL and Sun have formed an alliance and Sun will be pressuring them to use their technology.
Java will most likely be used even if it is less than satisfactory from a technology standpoint since the business people will be making the decisions and not the technology people.
None of the opinions expressed here reflect those held by my employer or my school in any way.
Until you realized that having the DeathStar explode in orbit doomed the sanctuary moon to an ecological disaster. The Ewoks are in for a good strong (many year long) winter, not to mention the tremendious amount of junk that will be falling out of the sky all over the place. Not to mention the large amount of stuff (like the reactor core) that will likely be highly radioactive. How's that for an up note?
Well, it's not better than current US spy satellites, but it is certainly better than anything Senior Dictatado has. I think there are several Government agencies that wanted to keep this satellite out of the hands of the public, weather they did anything or not is another question however.
NFS compatability with IRIX NFS. For some reason (in my experience) SGI-TO-SGI NFS is way-faster than SGI-Linux.
This may be a "feature" of your PC's bus and ethernet card. Basically the SGI box can send packets to your PC faster than it can generate interrupts to handle them, overrunning the card. There is a section on this in the FreeBSD FAQ and Handbook
Well designed pages work quite well without the Javascript as well. Try accessing pages with and without Javascript and I think you'll find that the value they add isn't as great as it appears initally.
Maybe you can point to a page that uses Javascript effectivly to enhance the experiance. I'd like to see what you consider "making the page better for you".
>RANT< As a web user I find Javascript generally useless and slow.
It seems to me that 50% of the Javascript on the web is used to hilite a link when you move your cursor over it, which I think is absolutely useless. My cursor already changes when I move it over a link, and loading a button twice just to have it reinforce the cursor change is not how I want to spend my time.
Another 40% of the Javascript code out there opens annoying, useless "consoles" that take valuble screen space and rarely have any sort of meat to them.
The last 10% is a mixed bag consisting of opening up a homepage to a site when you leave the site (Really really irritating ones force you to kill the browser to get off the site); making forms more "interactive", where the most frequent offender is the pulldown menu that automatically jumps to whatever you select, nevermind if you get it wrong or don't have Javascript. Frequently these pages omit the "submit" button as well, irritating Lynx users to no end.
As if this isn't bad enough, Javascript is not exactly a solid standard, with Netscape and Microsoft implementing their own set of bugs and incompatibilities into each version of their browsers. "But this works on my machine at home and in the lab!".
In conclusion: Javascript does not add enough value to my web surfing experiance to counterbalance all of the negative issues associated with it. >/RANT<
This shouldn't be a problem for the Paralell port version, but IIRC PC serial ports can trasfer at 112kpbs maximum whereas several MP3s can be encoded as high as 224kpbs. Worse, many old computers (486s) can only transfer at 56kpbs, which cuts out a large portion of the MP3s available. Naturally this isn't a problem if you encode your own music, but it might be if you download from online MP3 resellers or fledgling bands.
That graphic at the top of the page doesn't have a caption, how about this one: "Presidental hopeful Al Gore stockpiles mud for the upcoming election campaign"
Well, with SGI/Cray out front. 32 processors? Try closer to 265 and beyond. NT doesn't scale well beyond 4 processors, and even at 4 you can see the scaling issues in NT. Worse, the Intel x86 arcitecture leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you start scaling to tens of processors. Just look at the kind of contention you see on a PCI bus on a single processor system running a moderatly memory and graphics intensive process. Even if you scale a Linux/x86 box to XX processors, you may not be able to use most of that power because the chips are always waiting for memory/IO/communication with the video or audio subsystem.
As to logging: Most free Unixes do a pretty good job of logging, although most commercial Unixes do better. The difference isn't substantial, but it is the kind of stuff you can only do with intimate knowledge of the hardware. As compared to NT, every Unix flavor I've seen blows the pants of NT w.r.t. logging.
AFAIK Linux doesn't have a general system level statistics logging ala Performance CoPilot. This makes Linux a little more difficult to determine exactly where the bottleneck is on a loaded system. (Is my system slow because I'm out of System Time, or am I always waiting for disk I/O, or maybe the PCI bus is jammed up?)
As to your aside: most big systems spend a very small fraction of their time with all of the resource management tasks, and these tasks are necessary when you have to determine what to add to a system. It is extremely difficult to determine where the bottleneck is in a system when you don't have statistical information on every subsystem over a period of time, especially when the bottleneck isn't something obvious like memory or CPU time, but something more fundimental like contention on your SCSI busses or memory bandwidth issues.
Hello McFly, ACs can't set preferences because they don't log in. Even if you could set preferences, then they would be changed about 3 times a second by all of the AC d00dz. Plus, after seeing the site with a -1 threshold, I'm glad for the moderation. Personally, I don't need to see the: You all suck!!!!! Microsoft rules!!!!! How do I hack into systems? That article sucked, Rob is an idiot, I am a god! posts that are consist of 99% of the moderated content. Keep the moderation up Rob, keep the losers frustrated!
Explain the Star Office comment
on
CeBIT Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
Probabally:
Staroffice thinks the world consists only of the USA and Germany.
I think that was a reference too all general Operating systems. Sony is saying that they will use some custom loader with a few extensions rather than a full blown OS in the PSX-II, which is exactly how consoles are built today. Linux will be used for DEVELOPMENT, but not for execution. Besides, why would you need PCI/IDE/SCSI/Serial Port/telnet/csh/etc... support in a Playstation anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect (although I have not done the research) that there is quite a bit of prior art for this patent. Unfortunatly digging up configurations for the web servers from 3 years ago may be quite difficult.
Of course what we really need is a documented channel for challenging patents that are too obvious/trivial.
I guess this is as good a time as any for the obligatory "Why are they only looking into infringement opportunities now? Certainly they've seen these kind of server setups popping up all over the place for a couple of years now, why did they wait so long? It must be the money."
First: Have you read the moderator guidelines? I think they clear up a lot of the questions you might have.
Basically, you get moderator points for "good behavior" among other things. This includes posting followups that get moderated up and not followups that get moderated down. You also get points for reading Slashdot x number of times a week where x is neither too small nor too large. Finally, there is a random factor and some stuff Cmdrtaco threw in the code to determine who gets the points.
As for using the points, it will be obvious once you get them (there used to be radio buttons under the article, now there will be pulldown lists). Just select the score you want to assign an article and hit the "Moderate" button on the bottom of the page.
I hope this clears the whole moderation thing up for you.
It might be a good way to read Slashdot when you stop for lunch. Just stop in, read a couple of articles and responses while you eat your burger and fries, and get back to work/on the road in 15 mins. Basically, it's a way to read a newspaper or whatever while you eat.
I'm just worried about the condition of the keyboard/mouse on the computer after thousands of average people surf on them while eating greasy food. They would accumulate keyboard plaque at an alaming rate.
I'm confused why people are so worried about distribution of the trailers. I thought the whole point of the trailers was to advertise the movie, so the more copies of the trailers you have floating around, the more advertising the movie gets. (Like Star Wars needs more advertising). Why would you want to restrict your advertising by prosecuting all of the people who mirror your trailer for free?
:)
I also don't understand the comment in the article about "forstalling" the piracy of the second trailer by having it available only on their website (http://www.starwars.com). I don't see how that forstalls anything (except that their server was completely overloaded and slower than molassass).
With that said, I do agree with him about people who pirate the entire movie. Not only do they steal from Mr. Lucas, but they also tie up a lot of bandwidth that people could otherwise use to read Slashdot.
Ug, that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I for one would not want to be forced to make my program entirely from patches simply because I reused some bit of code from a previous open-source work. I also don't think it is outright stealing when you grab a piece of code from some other project and use it in your current project, in fact I call that code reuse. Of course I'll give credit where it is due, but I don't want to be forced to adopt a license I may not agree with because I reused some code. It's almost as bad a being proprietary. Besides, some of the best software projects around are primarily the works of "forkers" and "theives". Apache for instace.
On a final note, I think trying to create a software licence by a committiee with parties from the FSF and BSD advocates is doomed to a long slow death from conflicting viewpoints.
I doubt it. SGI already has Irix for MIPS, so there is no compelling reason for them to pay to port Linux to MIPS. Linux engineers will probabally be reimplementing a lot of the work SGI did for Irix to get it as as scalable as it is today in Linux. Hopefully they will also be porting xfs to IA86. Imagine if everyone in the world used the same winning filesystem.
That only works if you are only exporting the kernel and not a whole distro. Most of the GNU software was developed in the US AFAIK. Even with distros developed out of the country (S.U.S.E. for example), there is almost certainly more than 10% code from the US in there.
By the way, does anybody know WHY the US has this restriction? Is it part of some sort of embargo? And where did this 10% figure come from?
Well, you can order the FreeBSD CD direct from Walnut Creek CDROM (the people who sponsor ftp.cdrom.com, maybe you've heard of them). Check out their homepage at http://www.cdrom.com
The settops are going to use the MediaGX chips, which are x86ish so it could go either way.
It is more likely that AOL will develop set-top boxes using Java. I say this for two reasons, 1: Java was originally designed for this sort of thing, 2: AOL and Sun have formed an alliance and Sun will be pressuring them to use their technology.
Java will most likely be used even if it is less than satisfactory from a technology standpoint since the business people will be making the decisions and not the technology people.
None of the opinions expressed here reflect those held by my employer or my school in any way.
Until you realized that having the DeathStar explode in orbit doomed the sanctuary moon to an ecological disaster. The Ewoks are in for a good strong (many year long) winter, not to mention the tremendious amount of junk that will be falling out of the sky all over the place. Not to mention the large amount of stuff (like the reactor core) that will likely be highly radioactive. How's that for an up note?
Well, it's not better than current US spy satellites, but it is certainly better than anything Senior Dictatado has. I think there are several Government agencies that wanted to keep this satellite out of the hands of the public, weather they did anything or not is another question however.
Are you sure your media is still good? I've done many many xfsdumps and xfsrestores without a problem. Plus it is SO much faster than tar.
NFS compatability with IRIX NFS. For some reason (in my experience) SGI-TO-SGI NFS is way-faster than SGI-Linux.
This may be a "feature" of your PC's bus and ethernet card. Basically the SGI box can send packets to your PC faster than it can generate interrupts to handle them, overrunning the card. There is a section on this in the FreeBSD FAQ and Handbook
Well designed pages work quite well without the Javascript as well. Try accessing pages with and without Javascript and I think you'll find that the value they add isn't as great as it appears initally.
Maybe you can point to a page that uses Javascript effectivly to enhance the experiance. I'd like to see what you consider "making the page better for you".
>RANT< As a web user I find Javascript generally useless and slow.
It seems to me that 50% of the Javascript on the web is used to hilite a link when you move your cursor over it, which I think is absolutely useless. My cursor already changes when I move it over a link, and loading a button twice just to have it reinforce the cursor change is not how I want to spend my time.
Another 40% of the Javascript code out there opens annoying, useless "consoles" that take valuble screen space and rarely have any sort of meat to them.
The last 10% is a mixed bag consisting of opening up a homepage to a site when you leave the site (Really really irritating ones force you to kill the browser to get off the site); making forms more "interactive", where the most frequent offender is the pulldown menu that automatically jumps to whatever you select, nevermind if you get it wrong or don't have Javascript. Frequently these pages omit the "submit" button as well, irritating Lynx users to no end.
As if this isn't bad enough, Javascript is not exactly a solid standard, with Netscape and Microsoft implementing their own set of bugs and incompatibilities into each version of their browsers. "But this works on my machine at home and in the lab!".
In conclusion: Javascript does not add enough value to my web surfing experiance to counterbalance all of the negative issues associated with it. >/RANT<
This shouldn't be a problem for the Paralell port version, but IIRC PC serial ports can trasfer at 112kpbs maximum whereas several MP3s can be encoded as high as 224kpbs. Worse, many old computers (486s) can only transfer at 56kpbs, which cuts out a large portion of the MP3s available. Naturally this isn't a problem if you encode your own music, but it might be if you download from online MP3 resellers or fledgling bands.
That graphic at the top of the page doesn't have a caption, how about this one: "Presidental hopeful Al Gore stockpiles mud for the upcoming election campaign"
Well, with SGI/Cray out front. 32 processors? Try closer to 265 and beyond. NT doesn't scale well beyond 4 processors, and even at 4 you can see the scaling issues in NT. Worse, the Intel x86 arcitecture leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you start scaling to tens of processors. Just look at the kind of contention you see on a PCI bus on a single processor system running a moderatly memory and graphics intensive process. Even if you scale a Linux/x86 box to XX processors, you may not be able to use most of that power because the chips are always waiting for memory/IO/communication with the video or audio subsystem.
As to logging: Most free Unixes do a pretty good job of logging, although most commercial Unixes do better. The difference isn't substantial, but it is the kind of stuff you can only do with intimate knowledge of the hardware. As compared to NT, every Unix flavor I've seen blows the pants of NT w.r.t. logging.
AFAIK Linux doesn't have a general system level statistics logging ala Performance CoPilot. This makes Linux a little more difficult to determine exactly where the bottleneck is on a loaded system. (Is my system slow because I'm out of System Time, or am I always waiting for disk I/O, or maybe the PCI bus is jammed up?)
As to your aside: most big systems spend a very small fraction of their time with all of the resource management tasks, and these tasks are necessary when you have to determine what to add to a system. It is extremely difficult to determine where the bottleneck is in a system when you don't have statistical information on every subsystem over a period of time, especially when the bottleneck isn't something obvious like memory or CPU time, but something more fundimental like contention on your SCSI busses or memory bandwidth issues.
It's April Fools day, and I think you all just got taken again.
Try mp3info, I think it's exactly what you are looking for.
Hello McFly, ACs can't set preferences because they don't log in. Even if you could set preferences, then they would be changed about 3 times a second by all of the AC d00dz. Plus, after seeing the site with a -1 threshold, I'm glad for the moderation. Personally, I don't need to see the:
You all suck!!!!!
Microsoft rules!!!!!
How do I hack into systems?
That article sucked, Rob is an idiot, I am a god!
posts that are consist of 99% of the moderated content. Keep the moderation up Rob, keep the losers frustrated!
Probabally:
Staroffice thinks the world consists only of the USA and Germany.
or something like that.
I think that was a reference too all general Operating systems. Sony is saying that they will use some custom loader with a few extensions rather than a full blown OS in the PSX-II, which is exactly how consoles are built today. Linux will be used for DEVELOPMENT, but not for execution. Besides, why would you need PCI/IDE/SCSI/Serial Port/telnet/csh/etc... support in a Playstation anyway?