Ahhh, you're correct, a professor at MIT merely picked it as the game to study because of the high branching factor. I'm wrong, wrong, wrong about my history, a quick google search shows you are correct. Thanks for the correction, added to my mental notes about the game.
http://www.usgo.org/resources/gohistory.asp
Says it was founded at least 4000 years ago... However, the math is correct in the second post.
Hmmm, I'll have to go read the rules. However, they are independent choices are they not?
Your right, it's not ( 19 * 19 ) ^ 3, it's 3 ^ ( 19 * 19 ), which isn't a very nice size.
For a 1 by 1, I get 3 ^ ( 1 * 1 ), you get ( 1 * 1 ) * 3. Okay they match.
Now take a 2 x 1.
I get 9, you get 6.
First square can be: clear, white, black. ( 3 options )
Second squre can be : clear, white, black. ( 3 options )
( clear, clear ),
( clear, white ),
( clear, black ),
( white, clear ),
( white, white ),
( white, black ),
( black, clear ),
( black, white ),
( black, black )
Assuming the first square is independent of the second, it's 3 * 3, not 3 + 3. Simple combinatorics, I can't believe I screwed it up before.
Now there might be some pruning in there somewhere, because pieces have to be adjecent to each other or some other such nonesense. I'm not interested in doing that kind of combinatorics in a slashdot post. Sorry, that's too geeky even for me.
Lets use your logic on Chess positions. There are only 13 ways a square can be. Either pawn, king, queen, bishop, rook, knight of either black or white, or it could be empty. So you'd say it's ( 8 * 8 ) * 13 positions, so chess would have a total of 832 total positions. That's obviously wrong. I could memorize every position and the winning move if you'd give me money for doing so. I'd say it's 13 ^ ( 64 ). Which is a huge number. Now take my estimate of go and divide it by my estimate of the size of chess. You get a number with 102 numbers in it. So Go has a search space is 102 orders of magnitude bigger then Chess's search space. Assuming you could store the size of chess's brute force database in a single atom, you couldn't store Go's brute force database in all the atom's in the universe.
Mathematicians, and CompSci people don't believe it's cheating to brute force a game. In fact, they would do it just to know if the game really is balanced, or if white has a force win, or black has a forced win. They'd do it just to know, plus they'd used the brute force database to see when the algorithms choose the wrong moves to tune the algorithms to produce the perfect game. They'd also know how many pieces to spot the opponent at the start to be fair. They brute forced the game with rice that originated in Africa not that long ago just for giggles. It was posted to slash dot.
No way Go is brute forceable, and the guys at MIT didn't do it. Hell, the size you were discussing, isn't significantly bigger then tick tack toe, when dicussing it in terms of computing power of today.
Actually, you've got that wrong. That'd be ( 19 * 19 ) ^ 3, not multiply by three. Second, just assume it's always whites turn. If you are playing black, flip your colors to white, and search for what white would do in this position. I'm not sure you can do the rotations, 4 doesn't divide evenly into ( 19 * 19 ) ^ 3, so it would seem that that's not accurate, I can't explain it any more then the math just doesn't work out evenly. However, intuitily your correct. In fact you should be able to flip horizontally, and vertically, and both diagonals for symmetric positions also. (Actually you can do it, it's just not a perfect division because 19 is odd and the center line doesn't have to match the anything, because it flips to itself).
Hmmm, I don't believe what your saying is true. Go is studied a lot by people at MIT, who happen to be very, very smart. In fact, it was specifically invented at MIT because it was harder for a computer to play than chess, specifically because it has a much lower pruning factor then Chess. In chess, you can tell quickly, that okay, of the 20 moves I can make 17 are just stupid, don't bother examining them.
I thought there was some state of the game other then merely the state of the board, I thought you could capture pieces. I've never played, or studied the rules. I have read up about the game and the pruning factor while reading about programming chess players.
Need to kill high-ranking undead abominations? Mass frail spellcasters and rush them in headlong! No melee support needed!
What's your beef with this? I've never quite gotten the hang of playing undead, too much micro management of the hero's, and too weak in the early game. Magic as a general rule does whoop melee people, depending on what type of spell caster you are discussing, especially if they are ones that cast slow, this seams reasonable, Abominations are slow, they can't close. How many Abominations did you have, how many spell casters? Did you bring the hero that casts sleep on them all? Did you crack out the little wood gathers to make a zillion little targets? Did you bring a good mix of guys, or did you just bring Abominations? Did you bring something to resurrect them? Did you bring meat wagon's to have range on them?
If you hold StarCraft out as some great well balanced game, I've seen the 4-5 little lighting guys (Templar I think is the official name) take 120 Terran Unit points in under 10-15 seconds. Doesn't make any difference what they are. Battle cruisers, tanks, transports, marines and medics. I've seen them do it to a ton of Zerg units, generally Ultralisks are the only thing that hold up to a good batch of well played lighting guys. They've done it to Carriers. Best way to beat them, bring in zergling's or speedy units, possibly cloaked units.
I've been pissed when the Taurean Chieftan at the 7th level took 65 unit points and my 8th level Priestess of the Moon doing Star fall, pretty much single handly. I believe he had 4-5 grunts with him. It took about 120 unit points worth of Night elves to take him and his 40 unit points of grunts and spear throwers. Oh, did I mention, that it was the third time we'd taken over 100 unit points at him, and took getting him trapped between two different armies to finally kill him?
The game has met most of it's design goals. It's not a build a massive army and send'em. You need to go pickup items, you need to get your hero to level up. A high level hero can generally make up for a lack of a massive number of units. You have some incentive to go out early and actively fight creep while doing the upgrades. My biggest beef with it, is that losing the first big battle can be absolutely fatal. It means that more then likely you have given opposing heroes too much experience, and will spend a fortune rebuilding that you should be spending on upgrades.
The undead don't have a lot of game early, or really late. In the middle they are pretty good, especially if you can counter attack after whooping people with your superiour base defenses. They can expand and get a ton of money, and if they can get a good group of necromancer's with meat wagons they can be pretty impressive for fodder with the micromanage hero's well played, they can be devastating in the mid-game.
The Orc are great pretty much start to finish, but lack massive group killing spells or anything worth putting in the air. In term's of straight up melee battles nobody can stand with upgraded Tauran. Once an Orc takes an expansion, or a part of town, if they have pillage, they generally will roll units at you until you just can't keep up, it's a huge financial boon, especially if resources are tight on the map.
Night Elves, if you can get a big group of anything together, and get a level 6 priestess of the moon, you are hard to just crush if you can keep starfall running. They have good late game units, but don't have anything that can stand toe to toe with high-end melee units. Especially because they don't have a mass heal (non-hero based), or an auto-casting heal.
Humans seem to have good everything. Very well balanced, and can hurt you in a lot of different ways. Mortar men at with knights up front. The flying bird guys. The water elementals. The mass teleport, and auto healing w/ brillance to juice the healers, and a palaiden make them hard to beat. In general they can be pretty bad ass if they can level up the heros. Good magic, good range, good flying, good melee. Probably the race I consider too powerful. However, I play mostly night elf, and it might just be I haven't figured out the proper strategy yet.
I don't do much on Battle.net, a buddy of mine played it for StarCraft and said nobody online was worth playing because all the high ranking players ducked anybody who was good, so you could whoop on crappy players for weeks to try and get a game with a good player. However, we might try it on WC3, because what he's heard is at least the 2v2 and 3v3 ladder matches are really stiff competition, so that'd be fun to play. We gave up playing StarCraft against the computer after we took every defensible ground map 2v6, and every air and ground 7 player map 2v5. It just wasn't any fun any more.
I've done business w/ PC Engines before, nice guys. He has since left the US (last I read the web site he had), so it might be a bit tricker now. They shipped me good equipment (Flash->IDE converter). Because he didn't keep stock of parts, I had to wait a couple of days to get them fabb'ed, but at least I know they weren't RMA's. To be honest, I'm getting ready to pick up a POST card from him.
That said, I have no idea how well it works, or what the delay is now that he's moved. But I'd vouch for his good guy status, and he's shipped other high quality parts to me.
The actual part is so deathly simple, it should just read I/O port 80 and put it on an LED, so I can't imagine there is a bunch of difference in quality, but that's just me. Last time I needed one, the hardware engineer in the cubie next to me just hooked up his logic analyzer and 2 minutes later I had the post code.
Yes I'm crazy as a loon, but that has nothing to do with my post.
I'm saying that Disney states it needs to hold on to those copyrights because they have a fudiciary (SP?) duty to there stockholders, so they lobby congress to get every advantage possible, including destroying the public domain. I'm saying, well the best way to demonstrate to them that the majority of the stockholders don't agree with them is to become the majority stockholder and explain it in person in a stockholder's meeting.
You see, they are a corporation, they have corporate bylaws that they have to follow (or change, which they have to follow the rules to change them too). The only way to force the Disney corporation to do what you want is to play by the bylaws. If they don't play by the bylaws you can sue them in any old civil court to force them to follow the rules that govern the corporation. Short of just having a crappy lawyer, you should easily win the case if you are in the right about the governing rules.
I've got no personal abhorrance of Mickey Mouse, or any of the Disney characters. A boycott won't work. Too many people don't care, and they feed the Disney lobbiest monster with money. So if boycott won't work, and the courts won't hold their end of the deal to preserve the public domain. Our Congress men won't get voted out for the same reason that a boycott won't work, so it's not like we can count on Congress to do anything for us.
We can't win playing by our rules, we've got to play by their rules. I'm just saying, if you really don't like the way the company is run, and you are serious about changing how it's run, buying stock, and becoming the person whom the company always claim they are beholden to, appears to be the only way to do it. It's merely 17 Billion dollars. You're literally buying the copyrights you want released to the public domain with that money, and the releasing it into the public domain. Disney will never sell out the copyrights directly, so you buy it up the only way you can. See the maximum value that the copyrights can have is $34 Billion dollars (because I can buy up the company and all it's assests for that amount).
You're not going to win by public appeal, you'll have to together people who do care, who do have the financial clout to pull it all off to do it. There are a lot of pretty well off people who would willing contribute to good causes. I'd see this one as a good cause if run by the proper set of people.
While I like Lessig's idea, he's trying to use the law. Laws are something business people ignore, or get changed. I'm up for talking directly to them using money, and economic power.
Anybody know what the market capitalization is for Disney? Specifically, how much would it cost to buy up just over 50% of the voting stock? If the problem is that Disney wants to hold onto all it's copyrighted material, the alternative way to get the business people to understand is to buy up 50% of the voting stock, go to the board meeting, propose that all content created before say 40 years ago should be passed into the public domain then call for a vote. You might have to do more drastic things, like vote in your own CEO to get the motion to happen, but given that you own enough of the company, this should be easy to pull off.
To do this, form a holding corporation or possibly a not-for profit company, "Free The Mouse", whose sole job is to sell share of itself to investors/donators. It takes the donations/investments and uses them to buy Disney voting shares. It uses the dividens and re-invests those in voting shares. In theory this should be a one man operation, that should have only about $2-10K in operating costs per year for the accounting, lawyer fees, and money handling, assuming the one man doesn't have the required skills. You'd have to make sure that the corporation's by-laws and provisions about the spending and investment, and what to do with the value and stock once Disney had successfully been addressed.
If that stupid Mouse has that much economic value, we should demonstrate directly to the business people, we're serious about freeing copyright. Once you did it to Disney, you could move on to other companies. Heck you do it to smaller companies first. There'd be a serious move on for companies to buy up the shares, and become privately held shortly there after... Even those companies could be taken on, but there, the economic power would be diluted, because your using it to give the private investors an exit strategy. However, money talks to them, I'm not sure they wouldn't happily give up the company to get cash.
I'm only half serious, but it's about the only way anybody's going to make Disney understand that we're serious about just how much damage they are causing, and we'll use economic power to bend them to our will. The only serious problem with it is if voting shareholders decide to not sell the shares to block the holding company from getting enough shares to pull it off.
I know I'm talking about buying up a company that would take something like 50-$500 Billion dollars, but it'd still make one hell of a statement. But if the company is truely beholden to it's stock holders, this is one way to show the company it's in it's own best interest to move things into the public domain. The beauty of it, is that after Wall Street gets over the fact, that those ancient copyrights don't have any value, and it doesn't affect the bottom line of Disney, maybe other companies will catch on, that donating to the public domain makes you look like a good corporate citizen.
I'll point out several things. First off, cryptographic signing the binaries doesn't mean the binaries are secure. It just means it's the binary that I have is one that someone who has access to the private key has signed as the one they have certified to run.
That's it. It doesn't mean the software is secure. It does mean, that any joe user can't just run any old code they compile up. However, if they disable my ability to write shell scripts, they are screwed. SA's will not under any circumstance give up the ability to write quick little shell scripts. It'll never happen. They will vote with their wallet on that one.
So when a security hole is found in the cryptographic software, they won't be able to just download new binaries to trojan my system. However, they can still just follow the flaw they have found in all the time. They can still script up various badnesses. They will still be able to do all variety of badness to me. They just can't put a trojan'ed version of SSH on my machine to get my passwords. Instead they will script up ssh to run out of gdb, and write the passwords in the clear out of gdb, and run as per normal. Hiding what is going on will be difficult because root kits will be more difficult to install. Now all they have to do is uninstall, the binary once they have the appropriate pieces of information to authenticate to your machine. Now they just authenticate like a normal user. They are in, and can poke around all they want.
Signed binaries, only means your running binaries that you got from the vendor, that's it. It'll change how the cracks work, but it won't mean you don't get cracked. Trust me, given enough time and research a person can break into your machine using only the binaries RedHat or the Debian, or whatever vendor you use. I'll still be able to ship off your private data, I'll still be able to deface your web site. I'll still be able to compromise the CGI's. Oh wait, are you saying I've got to get the CGI's certified too. That'll never happen. Not in a million zillion years. Internal busniess processes move to fast to do that.
Signed binaries are no silver bullet. The best they can do is refuse to sign them until a full audit has happened. You don't need signed binaries for that, only install things that have had a full audit, and it's just as good security for the initial break-in. Once the intial break in happens, that's about monitoring for odd behavior, which again has nothing to do with signed binaries. Of course don't get too pissed off, if you don't get a shell with your new Linux distro.
On certain binaries, it would be nice to enforce the signatures on, like standard libraries, and the kernel. However, most people use tripwire to do that things like that. Maybe the ability for RPM's to carry around the signatures of the files they installed, then verify those signatures after the fact using read-only bootable media, with the RPM signatures on it.
Signed binaries are a good thing, but I don't see them as the end all be all of security. I don't see them as a useful tool, because they will just get in the way anyplace where you release binaries on a regular basis like I do where I work. If the signed binaries don't, they they aren't providing the security that I hear advertised for them.
No it's not about being free as in beer, however the GPL is supposed to give me code I can go tinker with, and change, and make it to my liking. Do bug fixes, and enhancements. Possible add bugs of my one. Having the one true binary that's signed kinda defeats the purpose. If I can't self sign the thing, then having the GPL'ed code is no good until I can get it signed.
Unless the BIOS has a provision of the owner of the machine to add keys to accept as legitimate signatures or disable the signature checking, having software I can change is no good. Unless there's some way for the end user to say, look I own the machine, and I'm technically competent to verify the software I trust, let me run it the source code is relatively useless.
If that mean's there's a dongle, switch or jumper that has to set up correctly, that's fine by me. Then RedHat and other major distributors can get there kernels certified and signed, and all of the other binaries out there. Then the masses can get trusted computing, and I can certify my own stuff as trusted.
Okay, so your saying, that it's okay for SearchKing to insert bias, and essentially sell a higher PageRank. It would seem that Google is being consistant. Note, that google doesn't say you can't pay google for a higher page ranking, they say you can't just pay money to get a higher ranking. I think google is attempting to be consistant, and be sure that there is no one you can pay to get a higher ranking, not even search king. They are attempting to remove the artificial bias that Search King is putting in. It's too bad that people feel obliged to manipulate this ratings to get better ratings, rather then pounding the pavement, and "earn" the links to get them the best ratings.
SearchKing is attempting to manipulate the page rankings artificially. Google's trying to stop that. It seems consistant with the goal of integrity (search quality integrity at the least). That's merely my opinion, I happen to agree with Google. I don't want a 3rd party to manipulate Google's results into a pay for rating system. If that's the case, I'll just go back to using the old Yahoo site where the highest bidder got to show me the top links. At least there I knew that was going to happen.
Google's not inserting their own bias, they are removing the bias SearchKing is artificially creating.
Hmmm, have you ever heard of views? They do specifically this. I've seen nested tables, but the seem to violite all the rules about Relational design. Oh, I'm a young pup developer, whose read enough to be a DBA w/ no experience.
create view view_name as select name, birthdate, age_from_bday( birthdate ) from base_table_name;
Where age_from_bday is the function used to calculate the number of years.
Oracle traditionally has problems with new stuff. Okay, Oracle only has problems with esoteric corner cases with new stuff, but I've run across some of them w/ partitioning. So for production stuff, your DBA might be right on the money. Good DBA's and good SA's get paid big bucks to be ultra-conservative, and say "No". That's because they get paid big bucks so when they say "This will work in a production environment for the next ten years with acceptable downtime", they are correct. This is coming from a developer whose had to do his own DBA, SA and production support work because we can't afford a DBA or an SA. I dream of having another team member to ensure the stability of my production system.
Well my only objection to the original post, was that it appeared to be implying Stallman's hypocritical, and preaches one thing and practices another. That I believe to be highly inaccurate. I wouldn't try and emulate Stallman's way of making a living. I would in fact not recommend not trying it. I merely objected to the idea that Stallman is hypocritical. Trying to earn a living doing anything is tricky.
Hmmmm, first off the only book I can't find of his for download from his site is the collected essasys on Freedom. Which as nearly as I can tell is a collection of the essays that are freely downloadable from his site. So your probably missing the index, TOC, the introduction, the forward and a few other minor bits. The actual information should all be there. I haven't actually hunted hard for a free copy of the book. I believe the information is all freely downloadable.
Second, Stallman won a $250,000 award (the Grace Hopper award in the early 1990's), and gets paid for speaking engagements. He supposedly lives off the interest of the award because he lives pretty cheap. He might finally be running out of money, hence the big push for donations. He's a pretty smart guy, he wins enough awards and grants I doubt he truely needs much in the way of finanial support from anyone to continue his current lifestyle.
He quit working for MIT back in '84. So I'm seriously doubtful they've done anything more then provide him with computer access and office space to work. I don't believe he'd accept money from them unless under contract terms that made it clear it was GPL software. That's why he quit, so he wouldn't have to worry about them trying to say he did it on Universities time. At least that's what he wrote.
All that said, Stallman's pretty far out there. He's not very connected to reality of the day to day aspects of earning a living. I respect him for being just insanely crazy about Free Software, and writing the foundation of the tools I use daily to get paid. He's done a lot of good. Hypocritical isn't something I think can be applied to Stallman about his views on software (maybe it can on books). Feel free to show me wrong. I'd be interested in finding out.
You could simply configure the phone number, name, and password like you do with any normal ISP.
AOL doesn't want to be another normal ISP. They don't want to provide you with straight dialup. That's not their business plan. They don't follow the standards, because they don't want to be a commodity service. They want a differentiated service. A lot of people use AOL specifically because once you get the CD, it's easy to install, and it has a good user experience. It's much simpiler then configuring the various pieces of software that you might want. It gives them something to compete on besides just price. If all you want is lowcost dialup, go someplace else, AOL isn't what you are looking for.
They want to make accessing their service, easy, simple, fun, and unique. Anybody can do straight dialup, what AOL provides is much harder to do. Not that I want it, but it is harder.
I've never had AOL, I never want AOL. However, I know people who have it, and they love it. If you don't like AOL, send the CD's to those crazy people who are going to dump them on AOL's front lawn.
I'll take the time to point out that, free software (read GPL'ed), specifically has Copyright restrictions. That's what the GPL is, a list of 10 restrictions that give you the right to copy the software. If you don't agree with them, you can't have a copy of the source, see section 6 of the GPL (I think it's section 6). Things without copyright restrictions are public domain.
I've known people who work at Wal-marts and Super Targets, and it's not as bad as she makes out (at least it isn't that bad everywhere). Part of her problem is that, she's trying to live in/near big cities on minium wage. Not a good idea. Second, shit even the HS grad who works at the local sandwich shop gets $9.00/hr, and gets paid overtime. I get a sandwich from him twice a week. Most complicated thing he does is run a meat slicer.
I've worked at a corporate supermarket, and even they paid more then $6.25/hr once you'd worked there for a year as a part timer. Full timer's got real benefits, and paid 7-9/hr starting pay. That was almost 8 years ago. I imagine the pay rate has increased. Shit at the local McDonald's they pay $7.50-$9.00/hr starting pay. If you show up every day you get regular rasies. I know, two different guys I hang out with are former managers of those places, that's preciesly how those are run.
So while I have some sympathy for the story on the link, I've got my own personal experience, and talk with family and friends who work basic unskilled labor jobs, and it doesn't match the reality I've seen. I've never lived in metro areas that large, so that might account for the difference, but that's mearly a sign it's time to move away to some place cheaper to live.
Hmmm, I'm not sure. I know a guy who currently is trying to get work w/ Microsoft for kind of contracting gig. It's good money, but the Federal self-employment taxes aren't light so keep that in mind, Uncle Sam's probably going to want an addition 15-20% more in taxes then what a regular employee is used to as an employee. So on a comparative scale an employee who makes 120K in contracting, probably has less discretionary money then a guy who makes 80K with full benefits, 401K, and all that. Granted being hourly's not a bad gig w/ the kinda hours a lot of programmers put in. I don't want to guess what I make an hour at my current job.
Not sure how all that contractor bullshit worked out, after the perma-temp issues they had. Thought they had to get rid of a lot of the weird status, and treat people who acted like regular employees, like regular employees. I know the IRS explained it to a company that I contracted for that, I was an employee no matter what our mutual agreement was, and as such, they had to pay half of my Social Security taxes.
Wal-Mart employs people for decent money, in small towns. Just remember, in a lot of small towns in Nebraska (the state I live in), you can buy a 3 bedroom, 2 bay garage home for under $40K. So making $8-10 an hour isn't such a bad deal. Groceries are more expensive, and other things about small towns would drive me nuts. (Like no decent book stores). However, you won't starve to death on what Wal-Mart pays you in small towns. When it's all said and done, Wal-mart makes a big pile of money they could be splitting more with the employee's, but then again MS, is sitting on $40Billion they could be sharing with employees and stock holders.
Nope, I don't want to work there, no I don't want to live in a small town either, but it's not like trying to live in a major metropolitian area making $5.25 an hour or anything.
MS buys companies and people. They pay very well. They employ lots of well-paid people.
It's my understanding from several people I know who either have worked for, or we're recurited by MS, that in fact they don't pay well. They compenstate well, but they don't pay well. In fact, people at MS right now are taking it the shorts because all the stock options are underwater. I believe they repriced a lot of stock options recently to help solve this problem. Any time a company reprices stock options, they aren't paying well. The last guy I talked to said that essentially he'd have to take a 35% pay cut to work for MS, then after 3-5 years when his stock options vested, he would be a multi-millionare. Of course I believe right now is when his options would have vested at roughly double the strike price, which means they are worthless...
So in a very technical sense they don't pay well. If the MS stock stops going up, a big pile of people at MS are way underpaid, and way under compenstated. So it's relatively risky, it's got good upside, and bad downside. Not what I look for, if I wanted in on that, I'd go into business for myself. That's why people have said that the best product MS makes are MS Stock shares. In a lot of ways they are correct.
What's the license on the binaries? Where's the agreement that says I can run them? I suppose since the binaries are available for download I can use those by implicit agreement. However, what allows me to copy the source if I don't have the GPL. Nothing. So again the source is in fact useless as currently licensed, because without a legal copy, it's pretty hard to compile. Someone who does accept the GPL could distribute the binaries to me, but no one can do that on firm legal ground. The licensing is self contradictory.. The binaries might be useful, because they did put them up for public download. Presumable that means I can run them. The source however, is completely useless to me.
I've got no problems with my code being in your tree, but the licensing agreement, is clearly incompatible with the GPL (go read the GPL closely, and it'll jump out and bite you). I think I see what you're attempting to accomplish. However, (f) is either uneccessary, or in violation of the GPL. I've given it to you, and under the GPL, I can't possibly take it back. I can change the terms of distribution going forward, but the copy you have is always under the GPL. I'm the copyright holder, but I've given it to you under the terms of the GPL. That's what the GPL is all about. Richard Stallman's for all his personality faults didn't miss much with the legal fine points w/ the GPL. Item (f) either redundant, or could be used maliciously. It's not legally clearly defined, which makes it very dangerous in the hands of a laywer. (c) is just redundant, and uneccessary. Read up on what makes the GPL tick. If they don't agree with the GPL, then they can't use the code in any way, read item 6 I believe from the GPL. The GPL isn't a contract, its a copyright agreement.
Thanks, for linking to the parent of my post.... It's the one I was responding too, after I read it, and clicked "Reply to this". I was well aware of what was said there.
BTW peercast.org isn`t a business, we don`t have any legal staff, we`ve got a few programmers working in their spare time.
So if it isn't a business, why exactly do I have to agree to let you distribute it under your commercial license? It's a business, or you intend to start one if you have a "commerical license". Working in your spare time is how most small business start, hell it's basically how Apple and probably HP started. If you have a product, and a commercial license, you should at least have a lawyer of some type who reviews contracts, and legal documents like commercial licensing agreements. Even if it's just a friendly group of people. If you ever do any thing for money, your probably going to want to either incorporate, or setup some form of legal agreement between all the major copyright holders, and that will take a lawyer.
You've not accomplished much at all by the licensing agreement, besides making it illegal to use your software. The licensing terms violate the terms of the GPL, which basically means nobody can legally use your under the GPL, and you haven't granted them the rights to use it anywhere else. Which pretty much means it's useless.
(c) and (f) are not as wholesome clean as they appear. They require implicit trust of the entity your dealing with not to at some point abuse your trust. They have a great deal of power, and a change in management, or a court order could cause them to abuse those powers.
You need a lawyer to properly interpret what they mean in c. Do they mean a specific version of the Peer Cast Commerical license, or do they mean what it says after you've agreed, and they've since re-written it?
The really stupid part, is they don't force you to give up your copyright. So if they you submit changes back to them, and they want to change the license, they aren't the copyright holder, you are, so they have to ask you for your permission. At least, if you hire a lawyer and stop them they do.
Okay, what in the hell do they mean by revoke in part (f)?. No one but a CVS committer can "revoke" anything. Are they saying, if legal issues come up you can't force them to remove the code. Uhh, they can't usurp the legal authority that says they can't have it in the first place. Are they saying, that if you change your mind on the source, it can't be removed. Uhhh, I've already agreed to your current license, what more do they want? They can always keep the current code I've submitted under the commerical license in effect when I submitted the changes. This has potential for abuse.
Do they mean, if they add code I don't like, I can't remove/revoke it in my local copy. Uhhh, that really not very GPL like, and clearly not compliant with GPL source.
Depending on how all this reads, and what precisely the legal implications of it are, this is not a very nice license. If they want to say, look, we'll accept your changes into the mainline tree, but you have to give up your copyright, and it's releasable under the GPL and our commercial license. That's a lot like the FSF, except the commercial license bit.
If they want to have terms on connecting to their network, that's fine. Make it a term of agreement for connecting to the network, but that isn't compatible with GPL as a term of downloading the source. The really ironic part, is what if you give it to me under the GPL, I never agreed to any of these terms, so they don't apply to me at all. I have them under the license of the GPL. None of these terms transfer w/ the GPL (specifically, because you can't add additional terms to the GPL). It might be a GPL like license, but it sure isn't the GPL.
I see what it is they are attempting to accomplish, but it's pretty clear they don't have a good legal staff. IANAL, and even I can see all kinds of blantant legal problems with this. I'd expect them to fold inside of a year as a business if this is all the more they pay attention to detail.
Effectively, in the proper configuration on a Linux machine, this could significantly speed up certain specific operations.
First off, run ext3 and put all of journal log file on. Poof, now you got a disk that has no latency pently for syncing the data. It will reliable be there when you reboot, so if you crash the log file is still there. You know all those benchmarks that Moshe Bar does where he turns off fsync() so he can push the CPU and memory to it's limits instead of the disk. He wouldn't have to do that so much any more.
Some Oracle DBA's would trade their soul to get Oracle's transaction logs written to something like this. A drive that has no latency is very, very good. No it's not as fast as RAM because it's behind a PCI bus, but in a lot of ways, no latecy permanent storage is the holy grail to a lot of problems.
If filesystems and OS's supported this, it's like getting a very flexible configuration for very high end SCSI cards. You know those really highend SCSI cards that have battery backed up RAM in them? The ones that sit behind that pokey SCSI bus? By putting the no latecy storage out in a place where you can get your hands on it w/ OS tools, you can custom configure it just the way you need it. You can upgrade it, you can add more. You can do a lot of things with this, that are much more flexible then any SCSI card will let you set up.
No they aren't the end all be all of permanent storage, however they have very specific usages, in specific high end situations that make them extremely valuable. If this one doesn't have an internal battery that can hold it's contents for say 400 hours without power, I'm not terribly interested, but as soon as it can do that without external power, I'd pay for it in a heartbeat for the Database servers and the high performance filesystems we run at work. A number of the ext3 people have talked deployment of devices like this will really improve the performance of a number of filesystems.
I don't think this qualifies as an Ask Slashdot Question, nobody has replied with an answer using the standard internet resources, as such, I request the question be recinded...
Sorry, I'd just gotten done ready up on the distributed.net article on the same subject. SETI@Home does have more information the interesting versus not interesting (RC5-64 doesn't). You can have the client generate a key, but now you've made it trival for me to generate as many public/private key pairs to overwhelm the checking routine.
As I've explained in several other posts in this thread. Now I can DOS the thing by generating hundreds of thousands of keys, and generate 2-3 bogus WU results's for them. Now send them in. They talk in the article about the highest team ever having only 8Million, accumlated over the course of years. I can easily generate that many which have to be checked by the trusted system to ensure the blocks I've done are correct.
Once I start doing this, the project will have to shut the checking system down. Either, I'll ensure no one ever gets to put any WU's thru because I've created a huge backlog of work that will never get caught up, or the checking system will become the bottleneck and there's no point in having a distributed system. Remember SETI@Home works the way it does because it's the only way to accomplish the processing. They don't do it because it's cool, or sexy. They do it because there's no other way to get it done.
The other problem is, you'd have to randomly check people's work. Otherwise I could simple do 10 WU's have my account verified as "trusted" and then start spewing bogus data at you. The checker has the slight advantage that because I'd be turning in such huge number of WU's I'm more likely to be randomly selected be verified.
As a percentage, I can also virtually sure I can get all the work units to come to me so I can check them under several private keys. While it's controlled by SETI at home, assuming I have enough bandwidth, I can write a client that requests huge number of work units. Because I'm not wasting any time actually doing the work on them, I could probably request 90% of the WU's that are given out in any single day assuming I have enough bandwidth. So I'd get de facto control over the answers turned in.
It'd be a big pain in the ass, but if I really felt like doing it, I could probably pull it off.
I thought I covered all three of your points in the original post:
All of this has a lot of tax implications, and accounting implications
if you plan on getting new computers by the time the lease is up, and the lease costs less money probably lease them. Especially if the company won't make money of disposing of the computers when they buy new.
Leasing has to be booked differently (as a monthly fixed expense I believe) which is good in the eyes of a lot of investors.
At least in terms of personal use, leasing is a horrible idea in terms of taxes. You get screwed pretty badly leasing a car for instance (at least in Nebraska, I get to pay the property tax, and not own the vehicle boy oh boy, what a deal...). You get screwed leasing/renting a home (anywhere in the U.S. because you can't deduct the interest from a loan). I'm mildly surprised it's a tax win to lease equipment (depending on how financing/loans work that might be better then leasing). Tax law is so screwy that I stopped bothering trying keep up with it.
I thought capital investments were the way to go tax-wise, and leasing and financing are not capital investments, but buying equipment is. Computers are weird because they depreciate really fast so that might be all backwards. It's not like buying a tractor, or irrigation equipment that will last 30 years.
Out of curiosity, when/why does it become a tax win? You seem to be better informed on the details then I am. I really am clueless as to why it is better tax wise.
I've heard lots of people say leasing a car is a good deal, but suddenly Ford (whom I lease from) is now raising all the pricing structure on new leases because they are taking a real beating. Which meant they used to be a good deal, but leasing won't be any more.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.usgo.org/resources/gohistory.asp
Says it was founded at least 4000 years ago... However, the math is correct in the second post.
Kirby
Your right, it's not ( 19 * 19 ) ^ 3, it's 3 ^ ( 19 * 19 ), which isn't a very nice size.
For a 1 by 1, I get 3 ^ ( 1 * 1 ), you get ( 1 * 1 ) * 3. Okay they match.
Now take a 2 x 1. I get 9, you get 6.
First square can be: clear, white, black. ( 3 options ) Second squre can be : clear, white, black. ( 3 options )
( clear, clear ), ( clear, white ), ( clear, black ), ( white, clear ), ( white, white ), ( white, black ), ( black, clear ), ( black, white ), ( black, black )
Assuming the first square is independent of the second, it's 3 * 3, not 3 + 3. Simple combinatorics, I can't believe I screwed it up before.
Now there might be some pruning in there somewhere, because pieces have to be adjecent to each other or some other such nonesense. I'm not interested in doing that kind of combinatorics in a slashdot post. Sorry, that's too geeky even for me.
Lets use your logic on Chess positions. There are only 13 ways a square can be. Either pawn, king, queen, bishop, rook, knight of either black or white, or it could be empty. So you'd say it's ( 8 * 8 ) * 13 positions, so chess would have a total of 832 total positions. That's obviously wrong. I could memorize every position and the winning move if you'd give me money for doing so. I'd say it's 13 ^ ( 64 ). Which is a huge number. Now take my estimate of go and divide it by my estimate of the size of chess. You get a number with 102 numbers in it. So Go has a search space is 102 orders of magnitude bigger then Chess's search space. Assuming you could store the size of chess's brute force database in a single atom, you couldn't store Go's brute force database in all the atom's in the universe.
Mathematicians, and CompSci people don't believe it's cheating to brute force a game. In fact, they would do it just to know if the game really is balanced, or if white has a force win, or black has a forced win. They'd do it just to know, plus they'd used the brute force database to see when the algorithms choose the wrong moves to tune the algorithms to produce the perfect game. They'd also know how many pieces to spot the opponent at the start to be fair. They brute forced the game with rice that originated in Africa not that long ago just for giggles. It was posted to slash dot.
No way Go is brute forceable, and the guys at MIT didn't do it. Hell, the size you were discussing, isn't significantly bigger then tick tack toe, when dicussing it in terms of computing power of today.
Hmmm, I don't believe what your saying is true. Go is studied a lot by people at MIT, who happen to be very, very smart. In fact, it was specifically invented at MIT because it was harder for a computer to play than chess, specifically because it has a much lower pruning factor then Chess. In chess, you can tell quickly, that okay, of the 20 moves I can make 17 are just stupid, don't bother examining them.
I thought there was some state of the game other then merely the state of the board, I thought you could capture pieces. I've never played, or studied the rules. I have read up about the game and the pruning factor while reading about programming chess players.
Kirby
What's your beef with this? I've never quite gotten the hang of playing undead, too much micro management of the hero's, and too weak in the early game. Magic as a general rule does whoop melee people, depending on what type of spell caster you are discussing, especially if they are ones that cast slow, this seams reasonable, Abominations are slow, they can't close. How many Abominations did you have, how many spell casters? Did you bring the hero that casts sleep on them all? Did you crack out the little wood gathers to make a zillion little targets? Did you bring a good mix of guys, or did you just bring Abominations? Did you bring something to resurrect them? Did you bring meat wagon's to have range on them?
If you hold StarCraft out as some great well balanced game, I've seen the 4-5 little lighting guys (Templar I think is the official name) take 120 Terran Unit points in under 10-15 seconds. Doesn't make any difference what they are. Battle cruisers, tanks, transports, marines and medics. I've seen them do it to a ton of Zerg units, generally Ultralisks are the only thing that hold up to a good batch of well played lighting guys. They've done it to Carriers. Best way to beat them, bring in zergling's or speedy units, possibly cloaked units.
I've been pissed when the Taurean Chieftan at the 7th level took 65 unit points and my 8th level Priestess of the Moon doing Star fall, pretty much single handly. I believe he had 4-5 grunts with him. It took about 120 unit points worth of Night elves to take him and his 40 unit points of grunts and spear throwers. Oh, did I mention, that it was the third time we'd taken over 100 unit points at him, and took getting him trapped between two different armies to finally kill him?
The game has met most of it's design goals. It's not a build a massive army and send'em. You need to go pickup items, you need to get your hero to level up. A high level hero can generally make up for a lack of a massive number of units. You have some incentive to go out early and actively fight creep while doing the upgrades. My biggest beef with it, is that losing the first big battle can be absolutely fatal. It means that more then likely you have given opposing heroes too much experience, and will spend a fortune rebuilding that you should be spending on upgrades.
The undead don't have a lot of game early, or really late. In the middle they are pretty good, especially if you can counter attack after whooping people with your superiour base defenses. They can expand and get a ton of money, and if they can get a good group of necromancer's with meat wagons they can be pretty impressive for fodder with the micromanage hero's well played, they can be devastating in the mid-game.
The Orc are great pretty much start to finish, but lack massive group killing spells or anything worth putting in the air. In term's of straight up melee battles nobody can stand with upgraded Tauran. Once an Orc takes an expansion, or a part of town, if they have pillage, they generally will roll units at you until you just can't keep up, it's a huge financial boon, especially if resources are tight on the map.
Night Elves, if you can get a big group of anything together, and get a level 6 priestess of the moon, you are hard to just crush if you can keep starfall running. They have good late game units, but don't have anything that can stand toe to toe with high-end melee units. Especially because they don't have a mass heal (non-hero based), or an auto-casting heal.
Humans seem to have good everything. Very well balanced, and can hurt you in a lot of different ways. Mortar men at with knights up front. The flying bird guys. The water elementals. The mass teleport, and auto healing w/ brillance to juice the healers, and a palaiden make them hard to beat. In general they can be pretty bad ass if they can level up the heros. Good magic, good range, good flying, good melee. Probably the race I consider too powerful. However, I play mostly night elf, and it might just be I haven't figured out the proper strategy yet.
I don't do much on Battle.net, a buddy of mine played it for StarCraft and said nobody online was worth playing because all the high ranking players ducked anybody who was good, so you could whoop on crappy players for weeks to try and get a game with a good player. However, we might try it on WC3, because what he's heard is at least the 2v2 and 3v3 ladder matches are really stiff competition, so that'd be fun to play. We gave up playing StarCraft against the computer after we took every defensible ground map 2v6, and every air and ground 7 player map 2v5. It just wasn't any fun any more.
Kirby
That said, I have no idea how well it works, or what the delay is now that he's moved. But I'd vouch for his good guy status, and he's shipped other high quality parts to me.
The actual part is so deathly simple, it should just read I/O port 80 and put it on an LED, so I can't imagine there is a bunch of difference in quality, but that's just me. Last time I needed one, the hardware engineer in the cubie next to me just hooked up his logic analyzer and 2 minutes later I had the post code.
Kirby
I'm saying that Disney states it needs to hold on to those copyrights because they have a fudiciary (SP?) duty to there stockholders, so they lobby congress to get every advantage possible, including destroying the public domain. I'm saying, well the best way to demonstrate to them that the majority of the stockholders don't agree with them is to become the majority stockholder and explain it in person in a stockholder's meeting.
You see, they are a corporation, they have corporate bylaws that they have to follow (or change, which they have to follow the rules to change them too). The only way to force the Disney corporation to do what you want is to play by the bylaws. If they don't play by the bylaws you can sue them in any old civil court to force them to follow the rules that govern the corporation. Short of just having a crappy lawyer, you should easily win the case if you are in the right about the governing rules.
I've got no personal abhorrance of Mickey Mouse, or any of the Disney characters. A boycott won't work. Too many people don't care, and they feed the Disney lobbiest monster with money. So if boycott won't work, and the courts won't hold their end of the deal to preserve the public domain. Our Congress men won't get voted out for the same reason that a boycott won't work, so it's not like we can count on Congress to do anything for us.
We can't win playing by our rules, we've got to play by their rules. I'm just saying, if you really don't like the way the company is run, and you are serious about changing how it's run, buying stock, and becoming the person whom the company always claim they are beholden to, appears to be the only way to do it. It's merely 17 Billion dollars. You're literally buying the copyrights you want released to the public domain with that money, and the releasing it into the public domain. Disney will never sell out the copyrights directly, so you buy it up the only way you can. See the maximum value that the copyrights can have is $34 Billion dollars (because I can buy up the company and all it's assests for that amount).
You're not going to win by public appeal, you'll have to together people who do care, who do have the financial clout to pull it all off to do it. There are a lot of pretty well off people who would willing contribute to good causes. I'd see this one as a good cause if run by the proper set of people.
Kirby
Anybody know what the market capitalization is for Disney? Specifically, how much would it cost to buy up just over 50% of the voting stock? If the problem is that Disney wants to hold onto all it's copyrighted material, the alternative way to get the business people to understand is to buy up 50% of the voting stock, go to the board meeting, propose that all content created before say 40 years ago should be passed into the public domain then call for a vote. You might have to do more drastic things, like vote in your own CEO to get the motion to happen, but given that you own enough of the company, this should be easy to pull off.
To do this, form a holding corporation or possibly a not-for profit company, "Free The Mouse", whose sole job is to sell share of itself to investors/donators. It takes the donations/investments and uses them to buy Disney voting shares. It uses the dividens and re-invests those in voting shares. In theory this should be a one man operation, that should have only about $2-10K in operating costs per year for the accounting, lawyer fees, and money handling, assuming the one man doesn't have the required skills. You'd have to make sure that the corporation's by-laws and provisions about the spending and investment, and what to do with the value and stock once Disney had successfully been addressed.
If that stupid Mouse has that much economic value, we should demonstrate directly to the business people, we're serious about freeing copyright. Once you did it to Disney, you could move on to other companies. Heck you do it to smaller companies first. There'd be a serious move on for companies to buy up the shares, and become privately held shortly there after... Even those companies could be taken on, but there, the economic power would be diluted, because your using it to give the private investors an exit strategy. However, money talks to them, I'm not sure they wouldn't happily give up the company to get cash.
I'm only half serious, but it's about the only way anybody's going to make Disney understand that we're serious about just how much damage they are causing, and we'll use economic power to bend them to our will. The only serious problem with it is if voting shareholders decide to not sell the shares to block the holding company from getting enough shares to pull it off.
I know I'm talking about buying up a company that would take something like 50-$500 Billion dollars, but it'd still make one hell of a statement. But if the company is truely beholden to it's stock holders, this is one way to show the company it's in it's own best interest to move things into the public domain. The beauty of it, is that after Wall Street gets over the fact, that those ancient copyrights don't have any value, and it doesn't affect the bottom line of Disney, maybe other companies will catch on, that donating to the public domain makes you look like a good corporate citizen.
Kirby
That's it. It doesn't mean the software is secure. It does mean, that any joe user can't just run any old code they compile up. However, if they disable my ability to write shell scripts, they are screwed. SA's will not under any circumstance give up the ability to write quick little shell scripts. It'll never happen. They will vote with their wallet on that one.
So when a security hole is found in the cryptographic software, they won't be able to just download new binaries to trojan my system. However, they can still just follow the flaw they have found in all the time. They can still script up various badnesses. They will still be able to do all variety of badness to me. They just can't put a trojan'ed version of SSH on my machine to get my passwords. Instead they will script up ssh to run out of gdb, and write the passwords in the clear out of gdb, and run as per normal. Hiding what is going on will be difficult because root kits will be more difficult to install. Now all they have to do is uninstall, the binary once they have the appropriate pieces of information to authenticate to your machine. Now they just authenticate like a normal user. They are in, and can poke around all they want.
Signed binaries, only means your running binaries that you got from the vendor, that's it. It'll change how the cracks work, but it won't mean you don't get cracked. Trust me, given enough time and research a person can break into your machine using only the binaries RedHat or the Debian, or whatever vendor you use. I'll still be able to ship off your private data, I'll still be able to deface your web site. I'll still be able to compromise the CGI's. Oh wait, are you saying I've got to get the CGI's certified too. That'll never happen. Not in a million zillion years. Internal busniess processes move to fast to do that.
Signed binaries are no silver bullet. The best they can do is refuse to sign them until a full audit has happened. You don't need signed binaries for that, only install things that have had a full audit, and it's just as good security for the initial break-in. Once the intial break in happens, that's about monitoring for odd behavior, which again has nothing to do with signed binaries. Of course don't get too pissed off, if you don't get a shell with your new Linux distro.
On certain binaries, it would be nice to enforce the signatures on, like standard libraries, and the kernel. However, most people use tripwire to do that things like that. Maybe the ability for RPM's to carry around the signatures of the files they installed, then verify those signatures after the fact using read-only bootable media, with the RPM signatures on it.
Signed binaries are a good thing, but I don't see them as the end all be all of security. I don't see them as a useful tool, because they will just get in the way anyplace where you release binaries on a regular basis like I do where I work. If the signed binaries don't, they they aren't providing the security that I hear advertised for them.
Kirby
Unless the BIOS has a provision of the owner of the machine to add keys to accept as legitimate signatures or disable the signature checking, having software I can change is no good. Unless there's some way for the end user to say, look I own the machine, and I'm technically competent to verify the software I trust, let me run it the source code is relatively useless.
If that mean's there's a dongle, switch or jumper that has to set up correctly, that's fine by me. Then RedHat and other major distributors can get there kernels certified and signed, and all of the other binaries out there. Then the masses can get trusted computing, and I can certify my own stuff as trusted.
Kirby
SearchKing is attempting to manipulate the page rankings artificially. Google's trying to stop that. It seems consistant with the goal of integrity (search quality integrity at the least). That's merely my opinion, I happen to agree with Google. I don't want a 3rd party to manipulate Google's results into a pay for rating system. If that's the case, I'll just go back to using the old Yahoo site where the highest bidder got to show me the top links. At least there I knew that was going to happen.
Google's not inserting their own bias, they are removing the bias SearchKing is artificially creating.
Kirby
create view view_name as
select name, birthdate, age_from_bday( birthdate ) from base_table_name;
Where age_from_bday is the function used to calculate the number of years.
Oracle traditionally has problems with new stuff. Okay, Oracle only has problems with esoteric corner cases with new stuff, but I've run across some of them w/ partitioning. So for production stuff, your DBA might be right on the money. Good DBA's and good SA's get paid big bucks to be ultra-conservative, and say "No". That's because they get paid big bucks so when they say "This will work in a production environment for the next ten years with acceptable downtime", they are correct. This is coming from a developer whose had to do his own DBA, SA and production support work because we can't afford a DBA or an SA. I dream of having another team member to ensure the stability of my production system.
Kirby
Kirby
Second, Stallman won a $250,000 award (the Grace Hopper award in the early 1990's), and gets paid for speaking engagements. He supposedly lives off the interest of the award because he lives pretty cheap. He might finally be running out of money, hence the big push for donations. He's a pretty smart guy, he wins enough awards and grants I doubt he truely needs much in the way of finanial support from anyone to continue his current lifestyle.
He quit working for MIT back in '84. So I'm seriously doubtful they've done anything more then provide him with computer access and office space to work. I don't believe he'd accept money from them unless under contract terms that made it clear it was GPL software. That's why he quit, so he wouldn't have to worry about them trying to say he did it on Universities time. At least that's what he wrote.
All that said, Stallman's pretty far out there. He's not very connected to reality of the day to day aspects of earning a living. I respect him for being just insanely crazy about Free Software, and writing the foundation of the tools I use daily to get paid. He's done a lot of good. Hypocritical isn't something I think can be applied to Stallman about his views on software (maybe it can on books). Feel free to show me wrong. I'd be interested in finding out.
Kirby
AOL doesn't want to be another normal ISP. They don't want to provide you with straight dialup. That's not their business plan. They don't follow the standards, because they don't want to be a commodity service. They want a differentiated service. A lot of people use AOL specifically because once you get the CD, it's easy to install, and it has a good user experience. It's much simpiler then configuring the various pieces of software that you might want. It gives them something to compete on besides just price. If all you want is lowcost dialup, go someplace else, AOL isn't what you are looking for.
They want to make accessing their service, easy, simple, fun, and unique. Anybody can do straight dialup, what AOL provides is much harder to do. Not that I want it, but it is harder.
I've never had AOL, I never want AOL. However, I know people who have it, and they love it. If you don't like AOL, send the CD's to those crazy people who are going to dump them on AOL's front lawn.
Kirby
Kirby
I've worked at a corporate supermarket, and even they paid more then $6.25/hr once you'd worked there for a year as a part timer. Full timer's got real benefits, and paid 7-9/hr starting pay. That was almost 8 years ago. I imagine the pay rate has increased. Shit at the local McDonald's they pay $7.50-$9.00/hr starting pay. If you show up every day you get regular rasies. I know, two different guys I hang out with are former managers of those places, that's preciesly how those are run.
So while I have some sympathy for the story on the link, I've got my own personal experience, and talk with family and friends who work basic unskilled labor jobs, and it doesn't match the reality I've seen. I've never lived in metro areas that large, so that might account for the difference, but that's mearly a sign it's time to move away to some place cheaper to live.
Kirby
Not sure how all that contractor bullshit worked out, after the perma-temp issues they had. Thought they had to get rid of a lot of the weird status, and treat people who acted like regular employees, like regular employees. I know the IRS explained it to a company that I contracted for that, I was an employee no matter what our mutual agreement was, and as such, they had to pay half of my Social Security taxes.
Wal-Mart employs people for decent money, in small towns. Just remember, in a lot of small towns in Nebraska (the state I live in), you can buy a 3 bedroom, 2 bay garage home for under $40K. So making $8-10 an hour isn't such a bad deal. Groceries are more expensive, and other things about small towns would drive me nuts. (Like no decent book stores). However, you won't starve to death on what Wal-Mart pays you in small towns. When it's all said and done, Wal-mart makes a big pile of money they could be splitting more with the employee's, but then again MS, is sitting on $40Billion they could be sharing with employees and stock holders.
Nope, I don't want to work there, no I don't want to live in a small town either, but it's not like trying to live in a major metropolitian area making $5.25 an hour or anything.
Kirby
So in a very technical sense they don't pay well. If the MS stock stops going up, a big pile of people at MS are way underpaid, and way under compenstated. So it's relatively risky, it's got good upside, and bad downside. Not what I look for, if I wanted in on that, I'd go into business for myself. That's why people have said that the best product MS makes are MS Stock shares. In a lot of ways they are correct.
Kirby
Kirby
Thanks, for linking to the parent of my post.... It's the one I was responding too, after I read it, and clicked "Reply to this". I was well aware of what was said there.
So if it isn't a business, why exactly do I have to agree to let you distribute it under your commercial license? It's a business, or you intend to start one if you have a "commerical license". Working in your spare time is how most small business start, hell it's basically how Apple and probably HP started. If you have a product, and a commercial license, you should at least have a lawyer of some type who reviews contracts, and legal documents like commercial licensing agreements. Even if it's just a friendly group of people. If you ever do any thing for money, your probably going to want to either incorporate, or setup some form of legal agreement between all the major copyright holders, and that will take a lawyer.
You've not accomplished much at all by the licensing agreement, besides making it illegal to use your software. The licensing terms violate the terms of the GPL, which basically means nobody can legally use your under the GPL, and you haven't granted them the rights to use it anywhere else. Which pretty much means it's useless.
Kirby
You need a lawyer to properly interpret what they mean in c. Do they mean a specific version of the Peer Cast Commerical license, or do they mean what it says after you've agreed, and they've since re-written it?
The really stupid part, is they don't force you to give up your copyright. So if they you submit changes back to them, and they want to change the license, they aren't the copyright holder, you are, so they have to ask you for your permission. At least, if you hire a lawyer and stop them they do.
Okay, what in the hell do they mean by revoke in part (f)?. No one but a CVS committer can "revoke" anything. Are they saying, if legal issues come up you can't force them to remove the code. Uhh, they can't usurp the legal authority that says they can't have it in the first place. Are they saying, that if you change your mind on the source, it can't be removed. Uhhh, I've already agreed to your current license, what more do they want? They can always keep the current code I've submitted under the commerical license in effect when I submitted the changes. This has potential for abuse.
Do they mean, if they add code I don't like, I can't remove/revoke it in my local copy. Uhhh, that really not very GPL like, and clearly not compliant with GPL source.
Depending on how all this reads, and what precisely the legal implications of it are, this is not a very nice license. If they want to say, look, we'll accept your changes into the mainline tree, but you have to give up your copyright, and it's releasable under the GPL and our commercial license. That's a lot like the FSF, except the commercial license bit.
If they want to have terms on connecting to their network, that's fine. Make it a term of agreement for connecting to the network, but that isn't compatible with GPL as a term of downloading the source. The really ironic part, is what if you give it to me under the GPL, I never agreed to any of these terms, so they don't apply to me at all. I have them under the license of the GPL. None of these terms transfer w/ the GPL (specifically, because you can't add additional terms to the GPL). It might be a GPL like license, but it sure isn't the GPL.
I see what it is they are attempting to accomplish, but it's pretty clear they don't have a good legal staff. IANAL, and even I can see all kinds of blantant legal problems with this. I'd expect them to fold inside of a year as a business if this is all the more they pay attention to detail.
Kirby
First off, run ext3 and put all of journal log file on. Poof, now you got a disk that has no latency pently for syncing the data. It will reliable be there when you reboot, so if you crash the log file is still there. You know all those benchmarks that Moshe Bar does where he turns off fsync() so he can push the CPU and memory to it's limits instead of the disk. He wouldn't have to do that so much any more.
Some Oracle DBA's would trade their soul to get Oracle's transaction logs written to something like this. A drive that has no latency is very, very good. No it's not as fast as RAM because it's behind a PCI bus, but in a lot of ways, no latecy permanent storage is the holy grail to a lot of problems.
If filesystems and OS's supported this, it's like getting a very flexible configuration for very high end SCSI cards. You know those really highend SCSI cards that have battery backed up RAM in them? The ones that sit behind that pokey SCSI bus? By putting the no latecy storage out in a place where you can get your hands on it w/ OS tools, you can custom configure it just the way you need it. You can upgrade it, you can add more. You can do a lot of things with this, that are much more flexible then any SCSI card will let you set up.
No they aren't the end all be all of permanent storage, however they have very specific usages, in specific high end situations that make them extremely valuable. If this one doesn't have an internal battery that can hold it's contents for say 400 hours without power, I'm not terribly interested, but as soon as it can do that without external power, I'd pay for it in a heartbeat for the Database servers and the high performance filesystems we run at work. A number of the ext3 people have talked deployment of devices like this will really improve the performance of a number of filesystems.
Kirby
Nobody has a proper google link for this?
I don't think this qualifies as an Ask Slashdot Question, nobody has replied with an answer using the standard internet resources, as such, I request the question be recinded...
All satire aside, it's an interesting question.
Kirby
As I've explained in several other posts in this thread. Now I can DOS the thing by generating hundreds of thousands of keys, and generate 2-3 bogus WU results's for them. Now send them in. They talk in the article about the highest team ever having only 8Million, accumlated over the course of years. I can easily generate that many which have to be checked by the trusted system to ensure the blocks I've done are correct.
Once I start doing this, the project will have to shut the checking system down. Either, I'll ensure no one ever gets to put any WU's thru because I've created a huge backlog of work that will never get caught up, or the checking system will become the bottleneck and there's no point in having a distributed system. Remember SETI@Home works the way it does because it's the only way to accomplish the processing. They don't do it because it's cool, or sexy. They do it because there's no other way to get it done.
The other problem is, you'd have to randomly check people's work. Otherwise I could simple do 10 WU's have my account verified as "trusted" and then start spewing bogus data at you. The checker has the slight advantage that because I'd be turning in such huge number of WU's I'm more likely to be randomly selected be verified.
As a percentage, I can also virtually sure I can get all the work units to come to me so I can check them under several private keys. While it's controlled by SETI at home, assuming I have enough bandwidth, I can write a client that requests huge number of work units. Because I'm not wasting any time actually doing the work on them, I could probably request 90% of the WU's that are given out in any single day assuming I have enough bandwidth. So I'd get de facto control over the answers turned in.
It'd be a big pain in the ass, but if I really felt like doing it, I could probably pull it off.
Thanks, Kirby
At least in terms of personal use, leasing is a horrible idea in terms of taxes. You get screwed pretty badly leasing a car for instance (at least in Nebraska, I get to pay the property tax, and not own the vehicle boy oh boy, what a deal...). You get screwed leasing/renting a home (anywhere in the U.S. because you can't deduct the interest from a loan). I'm mildly surprised it's a tax win to lease equipment (depending on how financing/loans work that might be better then leasing). Tax law is so screwy that I stopped bothering trying keep up with it.
I thought capital investments were the way to go tax-wise, and leasing and financing are not capital investments, but buying equipment is. Computers are weird because they depreciate really fast so that might be all backwards. It's not like buying a tractor, or irrigation equipment that will last 30 years.
Out of curiosity, when/why does it become a tax win? You seem to be better informed on the details then I am. I really am clueless as to why it is better tax wise.
I've heard lots of people say leasing a car is a good deal, but suddenly Ford (whom I lease from) is now raising all the pricing structure on new leases because they are taking a real beating. Which meant they used to be a good deal, but leasing won't be any more.
Kirby