....coz they're the underdogs, just like they got themselves into that lame auction consortium with Yahoo et al when they all individually had zero impact on eBaY's market share.
The next step - assuming anyone cares if it is worth fighting over (there is no direct revenue stream) a Microsoft IM client will be installed as part of the WinME desktop, and with any upgrade of any MS product (just like IE is now) and will offer to replace AIM/ICQ for you.
Using an el-cheapo used Pentium as an ipchains box, you can filter DS3 speed bandwidth with a fairly healthy ruleset without coming close to stressing it.
It would not be hard for Cisco, Foundry, Nortel et al to add enough CPU power to their medium sized boxes to perform similar filtering capability for ISP's border routers. Given the base price of one of these babies, even some extra dedicated hardware for this task (couple of I/O buses, a few meaty RISC CPU's, some RAM) would not be egregious.
What is the typical CPU complement of a meaty router?
The computer science dept at Edinburgh Uni has some very slick mass install stuff, for both Solaris and Linux - the CO's there publish papers on the subject.
IIRC the Linux setup is based on Red Hat, with their own custom rpm setups (not using the install tool).
For that matter, Doug Adams telling us the question to life, the universe, and everything, would add nothing to his stories (though it might add quite a bit to life outside of his stories if he got it right;) ).
Actually, it's revealed in the fourth book of the trilogy.
The.gb TLD does exist, and some half-wit from the UK government actually registered a bunch of ".hmg.gb" domain names; very helpful! I used to work at one of the afflicted establishments, and had a lote of phone conversations along the lines of "no, really, it's gb and not uk, and yes, I know all about the standard TLD's". They have since mercifully been switched to ".gov.uk" where they belong.
I can't see why anyone would want one of those clumsy.us addresses; it's hard enough convincing people that your email address doesn't end in.com far less getting them to transcribe that mouthful - I have a domain name from one of those tiny pacific island countries (main export - domain names), which let me have the second level I wanted and is wonderfully succinct, but it makes it hard when dealing with boneheaded customer service people.
The ubiquitous impact of copyright as opposed to other forms of property law allows an IP holder to levarage licensing terms to impose draconian restrictions on the licensee (c.f. buyer) which would be impossible with physical property. GM cannot legally prevent you from lifting the hood on your car, but software vendors can require you not to look at their object code.
IIRC, the way that Sony retains monopoly distribution of Playstation games is that the firmware in the console checks the CD for a bitmap of the Sony corporate logo (a copyrighted rendering of a trademarked image) and refuses to run them if it is not present. Since the image is so well protected by IP law, no-one else can distribute comaptible games other than by licensing the logo and complying with whatever terms Sony sees fit to impose.
The only way this would go bang on them is the same as how it happened to Microsoft - if Playstation became the single dominant console on the market and they created a de facto monopoly, which will upset them not one bit. As the founder of a US software company said to me recently, "I look forward to testifying at a DoJ trial".
Could similar legal theory be used to unseat these kinds of monoplistic lockouts?
You don't think that McD's ships beef and potatoes from the US over to France to turn into burgers and fries, do you?
Of course not, Mickey D's fries are mostly soya flour, which is why they are called "McDonald's Fries" in the UK - it is illegal for them to call them french fries as that would imply they are made from potato, which they're not.
During the hyped-up BSE scare, they were quite proud of the fact that they were importing beef from Argentina.
Have bought preloads of Linux from both IBM (servers only) and Dell (desktops and servers) and found both fairly good, as well as Penguin and local specialists. In the case of the Netfinity's, the VAR's install engineer called and asked what partitioning I'd like. The one set of servers we got recently with NO load at all was some E450's from Sun....
No, a hit rate of 1 in 100,000 or lower is probably more like it for spam.
The reason that (paper) junk mail and phone calls have higher hit rates is the unit cost - junk mail lists are prequalified because it's worth spending 40c per name to eliminate a no hopers from the list if the mail piece costs 60c a unit with postage. Telemarketing costs $3 a call, ditto.
In contrast, it only costs $20 or so to send out a million copies of a spam, so there isn't the same incentive to filter the list. I even get US-only spam regularly delivered to my.uk TLD email addresses, which would be trivial to filter for.
Commercial spammers used to rely on the thesis that "even if you only get a 0.0001% success rate, thats $xxx00000 in your pocket" to market their services but enough of their customers have been burned. The professional marketing industry is now waking up to the fact that with an unfiltered list you really can send a million copies of a spam and get ZERO sales and a ton of abuse hurled back.
The negative response of the public is all that is holding back the flood right now; the ultimate way to control it would be price rather than legislation - make emails cost a tenth of a cent each, and it would be enough to severely curtail spam without pricing real communication out of the market. This would be a retrograde step for the technology however, and I would only advocate it as a last resort.
Actually, for sustained throughput, HP's PA-RISC fares a lot better than Alpha on many problems, because it has much better memory / cache utilisation. A 200MHz PA-RISC will leave a 600MHz 21164 choking dust on a big FE job.
SpecFP only measures CPU core, it doesn't impact memory bandwidth, which is waht really separates a supercomputer. NEC's SX-5 (the world's fastest vector system) only turns over around 4.4GFlops / CPU peak, but it will do so all day long and has around 100x the memory performance of an Intel BX or VX or NX motherboard. It costs a little more than 100x the price of a PC though:-)
Nonsense - there is no minimum or maximum for H1, the law states "at minimum market rate for the job".
Companies hire H1's because there aren't enough talented Americans to do the jobs. Companies sponsor green cards so they can keep those talented foreigners.
Find me an infinite supply of competent US citizens, I'll hire them. Seriously.
This is simply untrue bullshit. One of the legal requirements of an H1 is that you pay foreign workers at least as much as the rate for US residents; did AC ever hire an H1 worker and have to file an LCA? Does AC even know what an LCA is? Thought not.
H1's can be transferred for around $1500 in legal fees, chicken feed compared to today's hiring costs. If you are in the north east, it takes around 2.5 weeks end to end (Vermont centre). Here in Texas, 2.5 to 4 months, but worth it for someone good. No, if you're on an H1 you can't walk out on a Thursday at 2pm coz the boss pissed you off, but you sure as hell can find another job and get it transferred.
Do you really think companies would jump through the millions of hoops set out by the well-meaning, benighted INS if there were tons of competent developers flipping burgers? Is Orrin Hatch smoking crack? Why did my local congressman's policy exec spend an hour on the phone with me asking how the H1 process should be improved and what impact it was having on the local high tech economy?
We are hiring competent people of every race, creed nationality and whatever, H1's, TN-1's or not. Anyone who thinks this is easy can damn well get their butt down here and do some recruiting for me.
(And, if you want a job with a tier one venture funded startup in Austin TX, good salary, stock options, etc. etc. and can write efficient and scalable server-side Java, email me for my work address ASAP)
Am I the only one that finds the increasing MSN media empire has uncomfortable undertones of Big Brother? Now when you get your new internet ready Win98-bodge-2 PeeCee it will bring up a web page (IIS powered, of course) telling you how to vote with a single click. The scriptwriters of Tomorrow Never Dies may have thought they were lampooning Robert Murdoch, but it seems we're soon to find Mr Gates in the featured role.
The problem for Linux is that you still don't get packages which point and click install. Everyone is still doing their own thing, from custom scripts (Oracle, Adobe) to DIY tarballs. Right now, as far as OS platforms go, there isn't one Linux, there's several, and Red Hat, SuSe, Debian and Corel all have their own agendas. No-one apart from the Linux vendors uses RPM, and not all of them do.
We still have people running around producing libc5 distros, which may be cool and geeky but it doesn't help unify Linux when everyone else is using glibc.
Against this backdrop, we have 95% of Win32 stuff which will point and click drop onto anything from Win95 to Win2K, and it even puts the latest version of Internet Exploder and 17 buggy DLL's on for you at the same time.
When you only have 5% market share, fragmenting that won't get you anywhere.
What Linux needs is a standardised install API that all software vendors can use, supported by all major distros, that will drop a piece of code on any x86 Linux system, and ensure it will work, right down to adding window manager menus and performing dependency checks.
You have to decide where your dog is in this fight - if you are happy for Linux to continue to be a fringe OS that requires serious hacking skills to run, then the status quo is fine. If you want to use it to take on the Redmond monopoly, then a standardised platform is essential.
The purpose of DVD regions is to milk consumers, esp. here in the UK, which is an English language market with high prices - the going rate in the US for a DVD is around $16 while in the UK it is more like L16 (US$25).
They realised well in advance that they could better control releases to extract maximum money from the market by rigging DVD to be incompatible across continents, which is what the whole region system is about.
Pointless? I don't think so. Annoying? Damn right it is.
Any new registrars outside Uncle Sam's Area?
on
Etoy Update
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· Score: 1
Are any of the new registrars for.com outside the USA? If so, the sensible course would seem to be to register with a non-US registrar and avoid all the bourbon soaked republican judges. Anyone?
> Linux has the advantage of a limited amount of asm...and being compilable by an almost universal compiler.
Actually, a big skeleton more than one of the commercial vendors have in their closets is that their commercial OS kernels are built with gcc and not the compilers which they sell to their customers, for the obvious technical reasons. I won't name names, but they know who they are:-)
If they stopped to think about it, they'd realise they could make more money by abandoning C/C++ compiler development and instead selling officially supported packages of gcc or egcs. A classic case of open source being a more viable business model as well as the best technology.
Linux and *BSD are far from being the only OS'es built with gcc.
I heard of someone in Canada who was surprised by the cops knocking on the door. Seems he was growing not a few plants in the attic (which was like in most houses, uninsulated) with the odd UV lamp or three to keep them cozy (hash plants only produce the goodies if made to "sweat").
Their detection system? His was the only house for miles with a clean, black roof - all the rest had a foot thick layer of frozen snow.
The car programs on US television reported on this feature weeks ago, complete with a demo. It is curious that it took so long to make it on to Slashdot, and given the non-timeliness, that it was posted here. Slashdot is usually up with the hunt, with news breaking by the hour these days.
Is this indicative that all (other) Slashdot readers are uberGeeks who drive clapped out Accords, and care not for technology that doesn't include an x86 chip? I'd like to think not!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
30Gb is pretty modest for a database; you can get home PC hard drives double that size. A big database is measured in Terabytes.
:-)
A wee Pentium server with one of those little hot plug SCSI trays is fine - just be sure not to use RAID-5 on your log drives
Run Oracle on Linux or even En-Tee - beware that on Linux there is a 2Gb per file limit which may constrain your layout.
....coz they're the underdogs, just like they got themselves into that lame auction consortium with Yahoo et al when they all individually had zero impact on eBaY's market share.
The next step - assuming anyone cares if it is worth fighting over (there is no direct revenue stream) a Microsoft IM client will be installed as part of the WinME desktop, and with any upgrade of any MS product (just like IE is now) and will offer to replace AIM/ICQ for you.
The rest of the players are an irrelevancy.
Using an el-cheapo used Pentium as an ipchains box, you can filter DS3 speed bandwidth with a fairly healthy ruleset without coming close to stressing it.
It would not be hard for Cisco, Foundry, Nortel et al to add enough CPU power to their medium sized boxes to perform similar filtering capability for ISP's border routers. Given the base price of one of these babies, even some extra dedicated hardware for this task (couple of I/O buses, a few meaty RISC CPU's, some RAM) would not be egregious.
What is the typical CPU complement of a meaty router?
DLink DE530
Netgear FA310
The computer science dept at Edinburgh Uni has some very slick mass install stuff, for both Solaris and Linux - the CO's there publish papers on the subject.
IIRC the Linux setup is based on Red Hat, with their own custom rpm setups (not using the install tool).
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/
For that matter, Doug Adams telling us the question to life, the universe, and everything, would add nothing to his stories (though it might add quite a bit to life outside of his stories if he got it right ;) ).
Actually, it's revealed in the fourth book of the trilogy.
The .gb TLD does exist, and some half-wit from the UK government actually registered a bunch of ".hmg.gb" domain names; very helpful! I used to work at one of the afflicted establishments, and had a lote of phone conversations along the lines of "no, really, it's gb and not uk, and yes, I know all about the standard TLD's". They have since mercifully been switched to ".gov.uk" where they belong.
.us addresses; it's hard enough convincing people that your email address doesn't end in .com far less getting them to transcribe that mouthful - I have a domain name from one of those tiny pacific island countries (main export - domain names), which let me have the second level I wanted and is wonderfully succinct, but it makes it hard when dealing with boneheaded customer service people.
I can't see why anyone would want one of those clumsy
The ubiquitous impact of copyright as opposed to other forms of property law allows an IP holder to levarage licensing terms to impose draconian restrictions on the licensee (c.f. buyer) which would be impossible with physical property. GM cannot legally prevent you from lifting the hood on your car, but software vendors can require you not to look at their object code.
IIRC, the way that Sony retains monopoly distribution of Playstation games is that the firmware in the console checks the CD for a bitmap of the Sony corporate logo (a copyrighted rendering of a trademarked image) and refuses to run them if it is not present. Since the image is so well protected by IP law, no-one else can distribute comaptible games other than by licensing the logo and complying with whatever terms Sony sees fit to impose.
The only way this would go bang on them is the same as how it happened to Microsoft - if Playstation became the single dominant console on the market and they created a de facto monopoly, which will upset them not one bit. As the founder of a US software company said to me recently, "I look forward to testifying at a DoJ trial".
Could similar legal theory be used to unseat these kinds of monoplistic lockouts?
You don't think that McD's ships beef and potatoes from the US over to France to turn into burgers and fries, do you?
Of course not, Mickey D's fries are mostly soya flour, which is why they are called "McDonald's Fries" in the UK - it is illegal for them to call them french fries as that would imply they are made from potato, which they're not.
During the hyped-up BSE scare, they were quite proud of the fact that they were importing beef from Argentina.
...we can also overcome thermodynamics.
These guys were purportedly trying to get VC backing for their perpetual motion machine recently.
Have bought preloads of Linux from both IBM (servers only) and Dell (desktops and servers) and found both fairly good, as well as Penguin and local specialists. In the case of the Netfinity's, the VAR's install engineer called and asked what partitioning I'd like. The one set of servers we got recently with NO load at all was some E450's from Sun....
The 2Gb size limit for single files is more of an issue. This was the bane of my life when dealing with CAE on Solaris 2.5 / HPUX 10.20
If the beloved x86 takes any longer to die peacefully it may need to be addressed.
No, a hit rate of 1 in 100,000 or lower is probably more like it for spam.
.uk TLD email addresses, which would be trivial to filter for.
The reason that (paper) junk mail and phone calls have higher hit rates is the unit cost - junk mail lists are prequalified because it's worth spending 40c per name to eliminate a no hopers from the list if the mail piece costs 60c a unit with postage. Telemarketing costs $3 a call, ditto.
In contrast, it only costs $20 or so to send out a million copies of a spam, so there isn't the same incentive to filter the list. I even get US-only spam regularly delivered to my
Commercial spammers used to rely on the thesis that "even if you only get a 0.0001% success rate, thats $xxx00000 in your pocket" to market their services but enough of their customers have been burned. The professional marketing industry is now waking up to the fact that with an unfiltered list you really can send a million copies of a spam and get ZERO sales and a ton of abuse hurled back.
The negative response of the public is all that is holding back the flood right now; the ultimate way to control it would be price rather than legislation - make emails cost a tenth of a cent each, and it would be enough to severely curtail spam without pricing real communication out of the market. This would be a retrograde step for the technology however, and I would only advocate it as a last resort.
Actually, for sustained throughput, HP's PA-RISC fares a lot better than Alpha on many problems, because it has much better memory / cache utilisation. A 200MHz PA-RISC will leave a 600MHz 21164 choking dust on a big FE job.
:-)
SpecFP only measures CPU core, it doesn't impact memory bandwidth, which is waht really separates a supercomputer. NEC's SX-5 (the world's fastest vector system) only turns over around 4.4GFlops / CPU peak, but it will do so all day long and has around 100x the memory performance of an Intel BX or VX or NX motherboard. It costs a little more than 100x the price of a PC though
Of course YMMV with your code.
Avoid the valley crush - get an overpaid dotcom job in Austin instead :-)
Nonsense - there is no minimum or maximum for H1, the law states "at minimum market rate for the job".
Companies hire H1's because there aren't enough talented Americans to do the jobs. Companies sponsor green cards so they can keep those talented foreigners.
Find me an infinite supply of competent US citizens, I'll hire them. Seriously.
This is simply untrue bullshit. One of the legal requirements of an H1 is that you pay foreign workers at least as much as the rate for US residents; did AC ever hire an H1 worker and have to file an LCA? Does AC even know what an LCA is? Thought not.
H1's can be transferred for around $1500 in legal fees, chicken feed compared to today's hiring costs. If you are in the north east, it takes around 2.5 weeks end to end (Vermont centre). Here in Texas, 2.5 to 4 months, but worth it for someone good. No, if you're on an H1 you can't walk out on a Thursday at 2pm coz the boss pissed you off, but you sure as hell can find another job and get it transferred.
Do you really think companies would jump through the millions of hoops set out by the well-meaning, benighted INS if there were tons of competent developers flipping burgers? Is Orrin Hatch smoking crack? Why did my local congressman's policy exec spend an hour on the phone with me asking how the H1 process should be improved and what impact it was having on the local high tech economy?
We are hiring competent people of every race, creed nationality and whatever, H1's, TN-1's or not. Anyone who thinks this is easy can damn well get their butt down here and do some recruiting for me.
(And, if you want a job with a tier one venture funded startup in Austin TX, good salary, stock options, etc. etc. and can write efficient and scalable server-side Java, email me for my work address ASAP)
As all the unwashed public knows, the current Linux version is 6.1 :-)
Am I the only one that finds the increasing MSN media empire has uncomfortable undertones of Big Brother? Now when you get your new internet ready Win98-bodge-2 PeeCee it will bring up a web page (IIS powered, of course) telling you how to vote with a single click. The scriptwriters of Tomorrow Never Dies may have thought they were lampooning Robert Murdoch, but it seems we're soon to find Mr Gates in the featured role.
The problem for Linux is that you still don't get packages which point and click install. Everyone is still doing their own thing, from custom scripts (Oracle, Adobe) to DIY tarballs. Right now, as far as OS platforms go, there isn't one Linux, there's several, and Red Hat, SuSe, Debian and Corel all have their own agendas. No-one apart from the Linux vendors uses RPM, and not all of them do.
We still have people running around producing libc5 distros, which may be cool and geeky but it doesn't help unify Linux when everyone else is using glibc.
Against this backdrop, we have 95% of Win32 stuff which will point and click drop onto anything from Win95 to Win2K, and it even puts the latest version of Internet Exploder and 17 buggy DLL's on for you at the same time.
When you only have 5% market share, fragmenting that won't get you anywhere.
What Linux needs is a standardised install API that all software vendors can use, supported by all major distros, that will drop a piece of code on any x86 Linux system, and ensure it will work, right down to adding window manager menus and performing dependency checks.
You have to decide where your dog is in this fight - if you are happy for Linux to continue to be a fringe OS that requires serious hacking skills to run, then the status quo is fine. If you want to use it to take on the Redmond monopoly, then a standardised platform is essential.
The purpose of DVD regions is to milk consumers, esp. here in the UK, which is an English language market with high prices - the going rate in the US for a DVD is around $16 while in the UK it is more like L16 (US$25).
They realised well in advance that they could better control releases to extract maximum money from the market by rigging DVD to be incompatible across continents, which is what the whole region system is about.
Pointless? I don't think so. Annoying? Damn right it is.
Are any of the new registrars for .com outside the USA? If so, the sensible course would seem to be to register with a non-US registrar and avoid all the bourbon soaked republican judges. Anyone?
> Linux has the advantage of a limited amount of asm...and being compilable by an almost universal compiler.
:-)
Actually, a big skeleton more than one of the commercial vendors have in their closets is that their commercial OS kernels are built with gcc and not the compilers which they sell to their customers, for the obvious technical reasons. I won't name names, but they know who they are
If they stopped to think about it, they'd realise they could make more money by abandoning C/C++ compiler development and instead selling officially supported packages of gcc or egcs. A classic case of open source being a more viable business model as well as the best technology.
Linux and *BSD are far from being the only OS'es built with gcc.
I heard of someone in Canada who was surprised by the cops knocking on the door. Seems he was growing not a few plants in the attic (which was like in most houses, uninsulated) with the odd UV lamp or three to keep them cozy (hash plants only produce the goodies if made to "sweat").
Their detection system? His was the only house for miles with a clean, black roof - all the rest had a foot thick layer of frozen snow.
Yes, Offtopic, but....
:-)
The car programs on US television reported on this feature weeks ago, complete with a demo. It is curious that it took so long to make it on to Slashdot, and given the non-timeliness, that it was posted here. Slashdot is usually up with the hunt, with news breaking by the hour these days.
Is this indicative that all (other) Slashdot readers are uberGeeks who drive clapped out Accords, and care not for technology that doesn't include an x86 chip? I'd like to think not!