Disclaimer: I'm an IT geek, I know nothing about business, but I watch several smart business guys with techie knowledge at work.
Basically, leasing and financing are all about cash management, they have very little to do with the value of the computers. That is, if you lease you nearly always get screwed. By the end of the lease you have pretty much paid for the computers but they take the computers away from you.
If you want to know the value get have the vendor quote out the price for leasing and buying up. Figure out the difference in the amount of money you have to hand them. You 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.
Now, if the lease costs as much (or more), or you believe the computers will have value after then end of the lease period, it's probably a buy situation.
Now there are some situations, like where I work, were we don't buy computers, we lease them, even though it's not cost effective by the standards I said before. The reason for this is cash management. It's in the best interest of the business to hold onto as much cash as possible because if it isn't cash flow positive (yet). So we hold onto the cash to keep the doors open as long as possible. Possibly the leasee will get screwed if we go bankrupt. Cash is king to a small business so we don't like giving it up until the last possible instant.
The other interesting issue with leasing is it gives you a lot of leverage. They still have to treat you well to get the money you haven't given them yet. Nice thing to have.
The reason you do financing is for two reasons. Either the deal isn't good enough on the lease, so you really want to buy them because it's a better value. So you go find a bank, get better loan terms from them, so the buy option w/ loan is better then the lease. Especially if you do a lot of business with a bank now, this makes a lot of sense. Now the bank has the equipment as collaterial, the terms are as good as buying, but better then leasing, and you haven't coughed up all the money up front.
The other reason to finance is because the company you want to buy equipment from doesn't do leasing. You can finance the computers and essentially lease them from the bank.
There's some other stuff I really don't understand (okay I understand it even less than what I just explained). Leasing has to be booked differently (as a monthly fixed expense I believe) which is good in the eyes of a lot of investors. Financing has to be booked as some variety of debt (effectively it's just a loan). Buying gets booked as a capital expense. All of this has a lot of tax implications, and accounting implications. Go find the person who does your books, make them help you make this decision. You're not a business guy, you shouldn't be making this decision. You should be spec'ing what you need, and who you want to do business with. The final decision as to what is the best value for the company as a whole is out of your realm of knowledge (and mine for that matter).
Normally all have buy options at the end of them. Be sure to get the buy option spelled out up front so if you need to keep the equipment because you haven't secured a replacement you can. Also find out what happens if you have to keep the equipment just one more month. Do you have to buy, or can you lease for just one more payment? Does the payment go up?
So all of this sums up to doing two things. Get all the options in front of you, figure out how much each one will cost you over the life of the computers. Now you know which one is "cheapest", you have to weigh when you are going to give up the money, and what makes the most sense from the business prospective. Leasing and Financing allow you to hold onto cash which in a lot of cases is more important then a marginal increase in cost to the business. Find the accountant/tax person, and have them help you with what makes the most financial sense above and beyond the merely technically implications of it.
Kirby
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ?
on
Cheating at Seti@home
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Okay, your right, I'd just gotten done reading another link from the posts, there is one from distributed.net that discussed all this, and actually was much more interesting then the original link. They talk about using a public key to sign data. Not that differs per individual, but even that is easy to abuse.
It's *MUCH* faster to generate bogus data, then it is to check it. I could generate thousands of work units in an hour. If I was a bad person, I'd sign up for a new name for every single work unit. Or only every 10-20 units. If I can turn them in faster then you can test and reject them, I'm winning. The DOS will actual work. Remember, they can't possibly afford to check 1 out of every million blocks of the data they are sending out, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it as a distributed computing project. I can DOS them if they attempt to run a "trusted" version of the binary locally. I'd whoop them really bad and generating bogus data. The attacker isn't going to play nice and put all their work units in under a single name if they are attempting to subvert the process.
I'm speaking from the perspective of an attacker who want's to subvert the process not rack up a big WU total. If I really wanted to rack up a huge work unit total, I'd take all my units under one name, and then submit them via 10 signed keys when they are done, so they all look like proper work units. Then they never check them locally, because they got verified by 10 different people as the same. How handy... If they have a set of "trusted" users that have to verify all the blocks, then all they should have the trusted people run the binaries, because everybody else will be throttled by the rate of the trusted ones.
In the end, they really can't check anything locally or only by trusted users, because locally and trusted users doesn't scale, that's why it's a distributed process. All the attacker has to do, is overrun the computing resources of the checker, and they win. It's not hard at all to pump to much data at them, because I don't need to do any real work to generate them, they have to do loads of work to check them. (Spoken like a man who use to grade tests.)...
Thanks,
Kirby
Re:Wasn't cheating to be "impossible" ?
on
Cheating at Seti@home
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This system opens up the can of worms for a DOS. Basically, if a given user can overflow the request for a new public key, so no one can request one, because he keeps the machine that is storing them too busy. The other alternative, is "checking bad blocks" is on trusted code doesn't scale with the size of the project. Now cheaters can turn the "checking bad blocks" into a bottleneck by submitting all bad blocks immediatly for you to have to check. Eventually the back log on check the bad blocks will be too difficult.
They also address this in the article if the cheaters can manipulate the system enough to ensure they get the same block twice and send it in twice they win. Plus 99% of all blocks have the same answer:
Nope, no interesting data here. That's it. So a cheater just has to send in "Nothing of interest here", for 100K blocks, then request a new public key and do that again. They could wipe out huge chunks of the key space because eventually they will get verified as correct.
When you give source to anyone to run on their machine, you can't ever trust the results.
What I thought was interesting, is that you say that you can hold Oracle accountable for missing data. What's to keep Oracle from claiming that you're a dumb ass and messed it up all by yourself? Doesn't the click through on the license basically keep them from being held liable?
What do you think management is going to say when Oracle tells them the employee is the one who screwed up?
I've submitted a request into the Oracle iTAR (Technical Assistance Request) system, at 3:00 AM, gotten a call back by 3:10AM, and a resolution by 3:45AM on a relatively esoteric bug. When I say, I get to hold Oracle accountable, I mean, I can hold Oracle accountable to get me up and running pronto with as much data as I'm going to get. It costs an arm and a leg, but the only people I've ever heard of who have lost their data using Oracle just didn't do backups properly. Oracle is pretty serious about keeping your data around. If you stay with stable tested versions, you'll be fine with Oracle.
I've had Oracle help me on de-supportted platforms, using non-standard configurations, doing crazyness of my own making. They always help me when I contact them for support. For production machines, I stay on the tried and true, but Oracle has never let me down in weird situations.
Oracle as a general rule, has *never* told me buzz off it's your fault. They stayed with me, and found it was my fault, and then showed me the doc's where it says I'm doing something that won't work. For all their faults, Oracle has *NEVER* failed me in any way when it comes to support. When it's my fault, I stand there and take it on the chin. However, as a backing store, Oracle will whoop anything I write eight ways to Sunday for speed, reliability, portability, quality, documentation and support. Hand's down. If you can afford it, there is no excuse for writting your own custom storage manager. If you can't afford it, try PostGreSQL. Oracle or PostGreSQL *WILL* be better for 99.9% of the cases out there. Google is one of the few examples of a situation where writting your own is probably a good idea.
For the record, out of the ~200 million records I've processed, I've lost 1, count'em 1 record using Oracle that was Oracle's fault (I've lost any number of them when Linux crashed, but that's my fault, not Oracle's). Even then Oracle clearly identified which one it was, and when it happened, so it was easy to recover.
I write a screen scrapping application, that downloads lots (100K + web pages a week). We write absolutely everything page into the database. 5GB is enough to hold about two days worth of pages. So we can't keep it in our production database. Especially because 95% of the data doesn't need to be stored except for auditting, but we keep it around in case a mistake is found, or a new tread in the pages happens.
The reason we use the database instead of the filesystem is deathly simple. The database is god-like. I can do point it time recovery, and guarunttee that the database is completely consistant with the recovery point. If I had all that in a filesystem it'd be harder. It means I have hot-rollover capaibility from server to server, without having to duplicate my filesystem from machine to machine, I just let the hot archive logs deal with that. It means I have one backup system, and one failure recovery plan. It means all I have to monitor is the Oracle tablespace to ensure I don't run out of space. It means when I say "commit", I can hold Oracle accountable for ensuring the data is there, rather then having myself held accountable by the management.
If I was a good little boy and swallowed all the kool-aid, I'd use iFS (Oracle's Internet Filesystem) and it'd be all good. However, I don't I just use a huge array of blob's in my Oracle database.
Now that said, I have a remote filesystem that all of this data gets spooled to. Once spooled there it gets written to CD. Once the CD's are written, they are then used to find, compare, and if they match delete the blobs out of the Database. The CD then deletes the files out of the spool. Duplicate the CD, compare the two, send one offsite.
The other reason we use the database, that it's easier to deal with in our application, because writting a join against the filesystem is tricky...
I'm a programmer, you want my copyrighted works, you get them on my terms. If my license is the GPL, copy and give it to whomever you wish, just include the source.
When I'm selling you a CD, and the terms of the agreement are, you don't get to give it to anyone else, then don't be surprised if I sue if you give it to people in violation of the contratual agreement. Even if they never would have paid me originally, they are not entitled to a free copy just because they won't agree to pay me. The ability to listen to music conveniently is not an entitlement. If I work selling my software out correctly, you will pay me for that CD, and I never have to work again if I can find enough people like you who will pay for it, and that's just fine in the USA. It's capitalism at work.
If you don't like the terms of the agreement, don't sign the contract. They have copyright for years. You have fair use, however, fair use isn't giving to anybody you want to. It might be giving it to your family. It is making a backup copy. It isn't giving to anybody who wouldn't willingly pay for it.
I'll say several things. First off, as long as the company is actively extending the work (essentially using the rights that would be given to the public when copyright is up, and the work is put in the public domain), thus advancing the state of art and science (which was the goal of the constitional language). I've got no problem with them keeping the monopoly for a finite period of time longer. If they continue to create and advance the work every X years. I'm okay with it. It will force content creation to happen. Which is good for the advancement of the arts and science.
I know the founding father's were great men, but they thought that black men should be counted as 2/5th's of a person. I'm sure they are wrong on the 2/5th's thing, and I'm it's entirely possible they are wrong on copyright. 99% of all works would end up falling back into the public domain after X or 2X years under my system, but don't under the current system. Essentially, anything left for dead is now in the public domain. Now the 1% that don't are probably the most popular works, the works that people would like to create new derivative works off. However, as long as the copyright holder is advancing the arts and science, I'm not sure why we need other people to do it. So you get access to the works in the original creator's lifetime, if they aren't advancing the work. So if Charles Shultz had stopped working on Snoopy 5 years after he started, somebody else could work on it in his lifetime. If he kept advancing it, he could continue to use it indefinitely. If he died, and somebody else kept it up, they could do it indefinitely.
I'm not sure why my language is confusing. I thought that copyright protected you from copying, and that works that are too similar are referred to as derivative works, and are against the law without permission (it's the language used in the GPL for example). They specifically defined derivative works. I'm using it as if it means, I can take you to a court of law and sue you for violation of my copyright (which has some legal standard I'm guessing, IANAL). Fair use are the rights you get even if the work is copyrighted. If I'm abusing the notation, happily correct me. You're the linguist.
No promotion of science and useful arts would seem to result from a person who didn't create any progress in the first place controlling a copyright on someone else's work.
Thus, I don't see how the extension of copyright after its holder's death as belonging to the original intent of the distribution monopoly.
In your first post, you claim you don't see promotion of the arts that result from extending copyright past the death of the creator. Making no distiguishment between recent or very old content created. I note the obvious benefit to the original creator to allowing it to pass on to their estate. I responded to what was actually written, not to what you thought you wrote. The fact that several people picked up on it, might be a sign you weren't clear.
From the parent of this:
I may or may not be correct, but at least argue the point that I actually made, and not some other one.
Sorry if I traveled a little far afield, I lost track of whom said what in the thread. Vinne_333 said this:
And children... should probably learn how to earn their own living. I don't see why being the son of an author that had to work hard their whole life suddenly makes you able to sit on your ass your whole life.
Look up to the top post on this thread if I have it right, that's where he said it.
This attitude I find assine. It's a perfectly legitimate way to spend your life if you have the opportunity. God knows if I have kids, I'll be sure and try to arrange it that way. I lost track that you weren't the original poster (but you were the right depth to be him *grin* if he had replied to everone). So yes it was in the thread, I just didn't realize it wasn't you who stated originally. He argued roughly the same thing you did, on not seeing the value of extending copyright after the death of the creator. Sorry, should have replied directly to him.
I've got a mildly different take on copyright then you do. I know that copyright was a originally fixed term (I believe you could extend it also for 1 more fixed term of the same length). I think it should be "a fixed term from the last time the copyright holder extended the work". So if Disney keeps changing and extending that stupid mouse, I'm all for them keeping the damn thing forever. It really doesn't bother me. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Nope haven't done a thing with it in X (X less than 10-20) years, it's public domain now. Oh yeah, and you have to register it officially every time you extend it (not the original works, just the extensions). Notice that it's the copyright holder, so whoever holds the current copyright can extend it by creating a derived work (that be the son, the newphew, the other guy at the company, or the original author). So anyone who owns the copyright can continue to extend it to hold onto the copyright. It forces more works to be created in order to hold onto the copyright. I'd like to make it like a ball and chain, something that has to be done that will weigh on the copyright holder. Just imagine how much stuff Disney would be putting out in order to extend everything they've ever done. It'd be insane how much content they'd put out. They'd have to pick, new stuff, or let something old fall into the public domain because eventually they'd run out of resources to continually extend the copyrights on everything.
This system will let the people who want eternal rights over content to keep it if they work hard, and it will give up everything to the public domain that has been left dormant for X years. I don't think much else will ever pass Congress because Disney will buy them off if they can't hold onto the copyright of Steamboat Willie forever. If the courts don't reign in copyright, this is the only thing that will pass IMHO. Once in the public domain, the derived works can be re-copyrighted, but anyone is free to use the original public domain work as a basis for another non-infriging work. It'll force advancements, and it's irrelavent who does them to me, as long as they continue to happen. For extra bonus, make X get smaller, and smaller the longer and longer from the original copyright it is.
As to the removal of value, it's not misleading. You could wipe out an incredible amount of economic benefit, possibly the value of the last 2-5 years worth of work. It might have taken them 5 years to create something that would generate that 99% in the one year. They worked for 5 years of their life, seems reasonable the estate should get the benefit of it. It's not like writting the Great American Novel is a weekend project for most people. They work 5 years, finish send it off to the publisher for acceptance and drop dead. The estate gets no value because the creator died in between? So terminating copyright at death could in reality take away money the guy had earned, but hadn't yet recieved. It's just like saying, the window washer doesn't get paid until 5 years later, oh, and he's not alive then it's free. Just because he let you slide on paying doesn't mean you don't owe him if he dies. I think copyright should work the same way. You agree with me on it, but that's what I was getting at. So yes, it's a lot like taking away the money a person earns in the last 5 years of their life. They earned it, they just didn't collect on it yet. The economics of generating copyrightable work for yourself is very, very difficult to do, that's why they get copyrights to create a monopoly. That's the only way to make a living at it. They have different payment times, and when you get paid for the work relative to when you did the work are very different from hourly/salary workers.
Well, that simple enough to explain. Any author who believes himself close to death now has zero incentive to produce any new work. If you were a window washer, you get paid presumable on net 30/net 60 terms, if not before you do the work. You die, your estate can still collect. Now, take an author for instance. If his work becomes public domain the instant he dies, he might lose out on a lot of the value in royalties.
I program for a living. If you told me my copyright on my programs would run out the moment I died, and as such would provide no economic value to my estate. I would get paid in royalties after my death, I have no incentive to work after the age of 55 or so. People in my family don't live that long. By that age, I'd rather spend my time with my family, instead of working hard to create a cool program that has zero economic value for the people I provide for.
Hell it's incentive to kill the author if you need to get access to his copyright. Stop and consider that one for a moment. It'd be in peoples best interest to start knocking people off who hold key copyrights. Run for cover if you've ever written a line of code used in the Linux kernel.
You have to protect the economic value for a reasonable time period after his death to provide value for his estate. I figure that you should get a monopoly for a minimum time, alive, dead, undead, re-animated whatever. What is being created has value to his estate, give it to the man, he did the work.
They give the monopoly to give incentive to create. Your talking about taking away his incentive. People work hard and try to provide for their families. There is nothing wrong with Junior getting the value his parent created. There is a problem however, in withholding the material from the public domain indefinitely.
If my father left me say 500Mil, and I could take that, put it in a regular old bank acount for 1% (any bank that didn't give me 3-4 even in this day and age is worthless), I'd get 5Mil a year. I after taxes I'd get 2Mil, I could live well off 50-75K easily, and grow the princepal by 1.9Mil a year. There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody bitches about that value being passed on (except the gov't, which wants 60% of the money even though it's already been taxed several times). Junior living off Dad's sweat. Who the hell are you to say it's not okay for his Dad to do that? The problem isn't Junior living off Dad's work. That's just fine in this country. In fact, it's part of the American Dream to provide for the future well being of your family. The problem is withholding the content from the public domain, not in junior living off Dad's sweat. Don't confused the two issues.
Remember, what your proposing is like taking away all the money somebody's made in the last 2-5 years prior to their death if the content takes 2-5 years to have viable economic value. That's a lot of incentive to not work if you think you'll die in the next 2-5 years. Author's create economic value in strange ways. We give them the gift of copyright so they will continue to do what they do best. Your taking away huge amounts of value, thus destroying the incentive of a lot of good highly experienced authors.
The other alternative is, now every copyright will be created on behalf of a corporation, which isn't a person, and never dies. Yes eventually it will run out, but I'd setup a corporation that I create all my content for, just so I could keep it the economic value around after I die. It'll cost me some money to setup, but it'll be well worth it for the additional value in my estate. Plus it is a good way to avoid estate taxes. All you do is keep all the money in the corporation, pay yourself a salary out of it. When you die, you have a lot less personal property, but the corporation has plenty....
They don't only use a fraction of it. They time share it between users. They sell 5 to 10 times as much as they have. It's like time sharing a condo at a resort area. You all pay 1/26th of the price of owning a condo, then you get to use it for two weeks out of ever year. So you get a really cool condo for about the amount of time you can afford to take off work to go see it. That's much cheaper then paying for the condo all year.
ISP's do the same thing. ISP's genearlly during peak times are using every single ounce of bandwidth they have if it is a pure bandwidth thing. They can pay at a percentage rate. So you take the 80-90% percential rate and then they pay thier fees based on that. Or it can be metered by the byte. So while a consumer bandwidth can be time shared, a always on server, is like living at the condo year round. You get to foot the whole bill.
Essentially, its just like business phones. Ever pay for a business phone? Where I live, Qwest will charge you 200-300 a month for a single business line, a home phone with the same services runs about $30-$50. Know why that is? A business phone on average gets 10 times as much use as a home phone during peak usage hours. The phone company has to build infrastructure for the peak times. Just like cell phone minutes during day minutes and night minutes.
If your trying to use up the "glut" of bandwidth on the consumer end, there isn't a glut... That's a fallacy... It's just that normally only 10-20% of your home customers are online at any given moment, so you can afford to over sell by 5-10 times....
The really ironic part about this, is the original poster said well, yeah, but it wouldn't be used by that many sites.... Which definitely isn't my idea of killer app....The basic premise of this is based on a false assumption that there is a "glut" of client side bandwith. There isn't, its just that the average home user doesn't use that much. When a home user wants 200K/s that's no big deal, because they'll only want it for an hour or two. When you stop using it, they'll sell it to your neighbor. When a production server needs 200K/s, they'll probably need it for 24hrs a day 7 days a week. That's why a 200K/s line to a server costs 10-100 times more then 200K/s service to your home.
Akamai is nice, but it's not cheap, and even the enormous and far-flung Akamai network doesn't have the degree of coverage that a large P2P network could provide running on clients.
True, but if they are cheaper if your big enough. They do accomplish it. I'll concede that not many places are that big, but there could be a competitor to Akamai that does do that.
And squid, while closer to the holy grail, is much more limited. It's a hierarchical system, and can't act as a "grid" of computers. You always depend on your parents (well, if you're a real squid nut, you might have a few siblings).
For this problem, all you need is a heirarchical system. P2P isn't neccessary. In fact for most problems, the ideal widely deployed P2P setup, would in fact be a heirarchical for 80% of the "grid", only the center piece of the grid would be dynamic. Sibling setups are nice, but for saving pages never want to ask your sibling, you always want to ask your parent, where your parent is the next squid cache on the route to the server that has the web page, but until you get close to backbone routers, where static routing isn't good enough, heirarchical is pretty much how the Internet works from you to your provider, from your provider to the upstream providers it has. To the upstream providers they have. Yes, there are a lot of routes, and a lot of redundancies, but squid is good enough when deployed reasonable close to do precisely what the original poster wants which is cut down on total bandwidth consumption.
Unfortunately, they seem to be happy with their damned transparent proxies (what the hell happened to *normal* proxies?)
People won't configure them, or route around them. I hate them too, because they've cause me plenty of problems when using cutting edge HTTP services like WebDav when getting subversion, but as a general rule they work fine.
But here is what I meant by glut. Most people's connections (with exceptions), broadband or dial-up, are silent most of the time. They don't pay any more whether they use that bandwidth or not.
Ummm, just out of curiousity, do you have any idea WHY client side bandwidth is cheap, and why server side isn't? If your basing the premise of your P2P services off this idea you'll completely violate all of the economics of bandwidth reselling. If you are saying you want to use spare dialup bandwith, and spare cable modem bandwidth to serve pages you've downloaded to other users, you'll drive the prices of consumer bandwidth to the price of server bandwidth. Why do you think so many bandwidth providers complain about P2P applications.
ISP's oversell capacity. Last I heard it was something like 5-10 to 1 on high quality ISP's. They over sell capacity by a lot. This over selling is why they can sell it to you cheap, because your only paying for 1/5 to 1/10th of the cost of the bandwidth. That's why getting a cable modem is cheap, and getting a server hooked up at 1/10th the speed is more expensive.
So I'll say it this way... If you're trying to use spare bandwidth from users to serve pages to other users, especially if they are off your local ISP, you will ruin the good thing we have going. We get bandwidth cheaper then we should as a consumer precisely because the content providers pay so much, because an average end user doesn't use that much bandwidth. If you break that up, you realize you'll get to pay server prices for your bandwidth right?
If your structuring your P2P that way, it'll be a killer app. It'll kill the pricing scheme of consumer bandwidth.
Akaima has caching servers in on every backbone provider. You should never ever, cross the backbone when getting data from a site that has an agreement with Akaima. This is done, because Akaima will run their DNS server, and will serve you a different IP address for a web site to direct you to a akaima server site very close to you, thus keeping you near the "cheap" client bandwidth you talked about on your original post. The net effect of that, a whole slew of people who only move upstream 3-5 steps, instead of all the across the internet. Saving an incredible about inter-backbone bandwidth. You pay them Akaima some money, and they deal with the bandwidth issues. Oh, and a user never hit your site. So you need a nice dinky connection to feed Akaima your data when you change it. They have economy of scale, and are very proficient at the problem. Most bandwidth that doesn't leave a backbone provider is cheap. They have lots of internal bandwidth as a rule. The end user gets the content much, much faster, and the traffic on the internet is smaller. Oh, and your content only has to be sent to Akaima when you change it, and your done. So you've got a pretty good chance of fixing up the problem.
Akamai doesn't do anything about bandwidth. It just stores information in its network closer to the end user.
So after reading this closely, how do you propose to save bandwith other then getting the content closer to the user? Getting the content closer to the user is the holy grail of P2P isn't it?
Squid solves the problem either by setting the brower up to use it as a proxy, or by setting up the a router to your upstream provider to transparently re-direct traffic to port 80 to a local squid server. So if anyone on your downside link attempts to hit the same page twice, you'll have no traffic leaves the network. Now your upstream ISP does the same thing. Now the upstream provider to them can do the same thing. The upstream provider from them can do the same thing, all the way to the backbone providers. So essentially, you pass thru various levels of proxying servers to get the content you want. Ummm, this sounds like a lot of Web Servers clusters passing around pages from other servers near them so you don't have to go to directly to the site. Which I'll bet money is paraphrasing your ideal P2P setup for web page delivery. Deployment of squid servers located on every Tier 1,2, and 3 bandwidth providers would look precisely like your P2P solution unless I miss my guess. This would mean when you asked for content, you'd only go upstream to the place it has been close to previously.
It's identical the caching layers in a CPU.
First you look in the L1 cache, then you look in the L2 cache, then you go L3 cache. Now you look in RAM, if it isn't there you look on disk. If you've got HSM (heirarchical storage management), you look on tape.
How does this make a site cheaper... Well Akaima is cheaper then enough bandwidth to serve the pages yourself (if your big enough). It's cheaper, because you don't need nearly the bandwith, and Akaima already is huge, thus having economy of scale so they turn a profit on it, while saving you money.
Assuming everyone runs a Squid Cache at the various levels as described above, you'll only get 1 hit per page on your website ever until the cached copy expires on your backbone providers Squid Cache. You have the 11 backbone providers talk directly to each others squid caches. When provider A wants a page from provider B it asks the squid cache of provider B, the squid cache goes to your site gets the page and caches it. From now one, anyone who wants your page will get it from the backbone provider who routes you onto the internet at large. Stop and think about it, you could be getting viewed by ever slashdotter in the world, and see a single hit.
As long as the core caches have enough disk, so you don't get flushed out, you only need enough bandwith to do just that. That's it. You only need enough bandwidth to ensure that your pages can get to the core squid cache quickly enough for the first view not to die of bordom, and that's it.
Of course you run a pretty dull site, beings that you only have a static site. It doesn't work for dynamic content that depends on user level information, but then again neither would P2P.
Actually, I'm not enough of a squid expert to say that for certain. You might get 11 hits per page, one for each backbone provider now that I think about it. Still not an overwhelming amount of traffic.
Now it's time to talk reality... The backbone providers don't want to do that.... It'll save you money, and cost them money because you pay them. However, there is nothing to stop a group of people running clusters of Squid caching servers to do this for themselves. So it's doubtful it'll ever get deployed. It however is a solved problem.
As an aside, bandwidth is expensive because it's expensive. Running a website will *ALWAYS* be expensive. The core providers will always charge a premium price for it because they are providing a rare service you can't get from very many people. They charge a premium price because you'll pay it,and nobody will offer it to you for less. It's that simple... Build all the tools you want, and running a site will still cost the same amount.
Yeah, there's a little company named
Akaima, and a dinky opensource product named
squid that beat P2P to the punch a long time ago. Akaima can solve the problem from the server end, and squid can solve it from the client end. P2P doesn't have to optimize web page delivery, it's a solved problem. Maybe not widely deployed, but anybody can solve it pretty trivially.
Okay, now P2P to solve multi-cast routing of streaming live content like movies and audio broadcasts so if 50 people on a single ISP are watching a football game broadcast over the internet live efficiently that's cool. Web pages are trivial. ISP's, businesses, colleges, have all solved this problem for the end consumer. Shit, you can't go to www.yahoo.com anymore without hitting an Akaima server. All cable modem providers in my area use transparent squid proxies to speed up web browsing.
If P2P's big goal is to solve a trivial problem solved by the HTTP 1.1 spec, in conjunction with a couple of Open Source products, plus a couple of large business, I'd say P2P is about 3 years behind the times....
That said, P2P has some cool applications and will solve some cool problems, I don't think Web pages is one of them.
Using M4 or some other preprocessor should alleviate a lot of the problems. You can use it to preprocess the code, before it gets to the C preprocessor. Possibly use a version of C-front, which outputs C code from C++, then just compile the C it outputs. Some of the C-front compilers support inlining no problem.
Otherwise, it's relatively simple to follow the rules to make using straight C macros not be dangerous. Everything you pass to a macro is a locally declared variable, with no expressions, and it'll act just the way you want. It's a pain in the ass to remember, but then again, you are writting an embedded system.
Ummm, I think they are fighting to have it have the copyright lowered to something similar to the lifetime of the author. Even if they do from the date it's published until 30 years later, that should end up being 30 years you have ample time to make money off of the work. What they are fighting is that major corporations are fighting for copyright indefinitely. Take Disney for example. Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse... Disney died sometime in the 60's. Walt made all the money he was ever going to make and enjoy by the day he died. Yes his family has some rights to his creation. However, the corporation at large has been living off that stupid mouse for 40 years after his death. They are fighting to have copyright made into a full blown right indefinitely. Right now, me at the age of 25, if I create something, I have the copyright on it, until at least the year 2077. Assuming I live another 60 years, that's 2137 before it's public domain. That's nearly two lifetimes. It'll 12 generations before it'll ever be in the public domain. It's too long. Copyright is there to enable progress, not to give a monopoly to the creator of the content.
Presuming they let you send out source packages, which I thought they announced we're on a public FTP server, how'd they violate the terms? Hmmm, I don't see them on a public server so maybe I'm wrong on that one... So if they don't let you send out the source code that's an obvious GPL violation.
However, if they dictate that you can't send out the Binaries they PGP signed, is that a GPL violation? I don't believe so, the sources are GPL'ed, the binaries aren't. If you recompile the binaries and distribute them, there isn't much anyone can do to stop you.
They won't let you post an ISO, that's just the same as the OpenBSD guys copyrighting it, rather then putting it out under the BSD license...
It's just like RedHat saying you can't redistribute a RedHat ISO as a RedHat CD. That's not a GPL violation, you are violating their trademark.
The only way they it can be a GPL violation is they don't let you send out the source code to anybody you want to. That's the only piece the GPL applied to. If the NDA says you can't send either the ISO's or the binaries, they are in the clear to the best of my IANAL knowledge.
Hmmm, I'm not terribly sure on this. Follow the link on the story. It looks like what he was using was a rinky dink program to essentially look for inodes before they were written.
I went and poked around some more, you might be right. It looks like they have several levels of support, one of which is some crappy shrink wrapped software. Not much it can do for broken drives. The other is a cleanroom pull apart setup like what I mentioned...
To be honest, they are idiots if they can't get enough of the filesystem off of there. I'd put money on the fact, that xfs and jfs are no better supported then Reiser. Reiser I believe is at least a secondary install choice on Suse Linux. I believe XFS is only the on the SGI rebranded RedHat. Meanwhile, I don't believe JFS is used by default on any system.
If they can physically pull what use to be the bits on the disk, with any reliability at all (which if they can't it's useless). At that point, I should be able to mount and retrieve a lot of data. That in and of itself would be of extreme value to the poster. Then you should be able to handily mount/fsck it, and get the data. I know I've done it before. Never with ReiserFS, but with ext2 on a drive that was fried on certain sections. Just used mount and tar, and I was done, I got 95% of the data off just with that. I'm not sure which of those groups they are, but all things considered just pulling the bits from the disk should be more then enough assuming the media isn't just totally fried to get the majority of the information off the disk.
Assuming, it's really, really necessary, there are ways of gleaming data off of a drive that has died. You can send your drives off to said company and for a thousand dollars a disk they take it into a clean room, disassmeble the entire platter assembly, physically prepare the platters so they are as good as can be, then put them under their own super duper head assembly.
Assuming you can find one of them, use google for gods sake. Get them to read the drive linearly. At this point, they should be able to put each drive onto new drives for you. Build a raidtab that matches the new drives they give you, do raidstart/dev/mdXX, do a fsck.reiserfs on it. Mount the thing. Poof like magic you have data again.
I've heard of several people recovering Ph.d and masters disertations this way. It's why the DoD has such strict standards about destruction and disposal of a hard drive. It's very difficult to delete data from a drive so it can't be recovered. It's can just get out of control expensive to recover the data.
If it's worth $5-10K, and you can deal without having it for several days, this might actually work... If the company bitches, just tell that it's about what a good tape setup would have cost if they had bought one.
The two guys who said try stripping the electronics are pretty brave SOB's, but that might be worth trying if you can't spring for some experts to deal with that for you.
I'll point out two things. First off, it's not going into space, it's sitting the the control room, according to the diagram in the article. Still some shake testing, but not quite as much cosmic ray type stuff.
Second, readup on the history of NASA. The book by Krantz is very instructive. NASA has a history of generating overly redundant systems. Way overly redundant systems. That's why they've lost more astronauts flying them around in little planes they they have lost while flying them to anywhere else. NASA didn't know a lot of stuff, and didn't have very good testing before stuff when into space. They just built it to survive lots worse conditions then the worst they thought it could ever be. The major problems they had lately is that Congress wants, soon, quality, and cheap. Every good Engineer knows you only get two, and then only if your really good and really lucky...
While agree with you, NASA's stuff right now is hardened and tested and known working. They got it harded, tested and known working, without losing a single person in space. Yes they have lost some during testing on the ground. Yes they lost the Challenger, and 7 astronauts, but that wasn't faulty software, that was faulty management not listening to the world class Engineers who knew something was wrong.
Well, actually it's not good enough for my Mom, she's a serious power user of Word. She writes resumes and various other things for a living. It's probably good enough for most "Mom's". Mom doesn't think Word is good enough for a lot of tasks she takes to Page/Frame Maker.
I've used the latest versions of Open Office downloaded the tar balls and installed. Sorry it just isn't there yet. The office sheet can't open most of the stuff that is published at work using MS Office. Thank all things good for printing to postscript/pdf's so I can read it.
The spreadsheet in it is pathetic in terms of formulas and mathmatical functions. I used the stuff I learned 12 years ago on the Apple IIgs and that works. However, when attempting to do simple date manipulations, or complex lookups, or any number of other useful features, it fell flat on it's face. It has a bug where I always have to set the cell size, because it picks an infinitely thin cell size on my machine. I'm pretty sure it's my fault, I just can't find a resolution for it.
I've had it crash on a 500 Cell spreadsheet I created and only ever edited in OO. It's nice, but it isn't ready for primetime, even for a regular user.
It's not office inter-operable. You're an early adaptor, and it's good enough for you. It's not good enough for work, it's not good enough for power users. When it is, it'll be heaven on earth, but it isn't. Just like Linux wasn't ready in the 1.2 kernel series to be a production database server. Yeah, it could route, it could do Samba. It could deliver e-mail. FTP, or web services. It just will take time for it to be ready for a serious beating that the general public will put on it.
For the record, I felt similarly about Mozilla around 0.9 or so. It just wasn't ready. I now refused to use anything but Mozilla. It has come a long way.
Open Office has a long way to go. MS Office has several years on Open Office. Open Office has a lot of crash happiness in it, but they'll fix it.
I can't begin to enumerate the number of people I know, who if given an opportunity to get a free as in beer and/or speech word processor wouldn't jump at the chance. Emacs (I'm a vim bigot) is probably worderful. LaTeX is just incredible. So is Linux. However, 90% of all people I know stay with Windows or a Mac because they need MS Office. Ponder the possiblity of commoditizing the Office Suite market. Linux has effectively made an high quality OS a commodity. If you don't feel like paying for an OS, you don't have to any more. I know BSD did it first, but for a long time they didn't do it well on x86 hardware. Play along for a moment, if you get OpenOffice up to snuff with the kind of quality and commitment that Linux has, it would be possible to get commodity hardware (x86), a commodity OS, and a commodity Office Suite. With a handful of exceptions of the 60 machines at my office maybe we'd need 3 windows machines instead of 57 we have. We keep 57 Windows machines so people can run Excel, Word, and Internet Explorer. It's that simple. A platform that doesn't exchange data in those Excel and Word formats is a useless platform to them.
Now when you add to that Mozilla finally has come around to being high quality. It'd mean Linux finally has the 3 of the last 4 major (Word Processor, SpreadSheet, Web Browsing are the new ones, it's had decent e-mail forever) killer apps that Windows has had for 5-10 years.
It'd mean I could buy my Mom a machine for $400, and put all free (as in beer) software on it, and she'd be happy if OpenOffice we're good enough.
Linux is grand and glorious, but it's a Server OS. It's based on a Server OS, it'll always be a Server OS. OS X is the first UNIX like OS that has a real quality desktop with full application inter-operability with the MS Suite. If Open Office could do that, it'd move a number of UNIX platforms into that category. Not being in that category will move you right off the list of desktop OS'es at every single place I've ever worked. Yeah the developers use it but that's it.
For that matter, screw Linux. Lets just talk about on the Windows platform. Do you know how much money is pissed away on licensing for Office? I think it's something on the order of 2-3 Billion dollars a year. That represents an incredibly amount of economic resources spent on this one little thing. I know MS does get it, and does good things for the economy, but personally, I'd rather see that money used by the business for developing their business rather then giving it all to a single company (even if it wasn't MS). Freeing people up from the burden of paying for a high quality office suite, would have incredible impact on the economics of computing. Probably more so then Linux ever has or will. A free high quality word processor that was cross platform would be a much bigger deal to people outside of the IT industry then Linux ever will be.
It'll take forever, just like people believing in Linux. Just step back and remember where Linux was in 1993/4. Lets see RedHat had just released it's first edition. SLS and Slackware were king of the distribution Hill. People had heard of it, but nobody actually used it publically. Open Office is probably in the same boat. Yet it works, its good, but not good enough to base a business on just yet. It'll get there. It could easily grow to have a much larger user base then Linux does. It could easily make Linux look like small potatoes to be honest. Because the set of people who need a UNIX like OS is much smaller then the set of people who need to be able to reliable create new content, and generate valuable information on a spreadsheet.
Neither Emacs nor LaTeX has any chance of filling that niche for the general public. They've been around long enough that if they we're going to, we'd have seen a lot more push in that direction by now.
Essentially, big business use to be able to steal your idea, and make lots of money off of you're clever idea. Now big business makes all the employees sign contracts to own all the employee ideas. Now having built up a patent portfolio, any time you do something novel (either as an employee or as an small startup business), you'll probably need some to license a patent from a big business if you're working in an area related to them. Now, they can cross license with you to get your idea, and use their idea.
Because you have to stand on the shoulder's of the giants before you, it's nearly impossible to do patent a new idea in high technology.
Big business has just figured out how to user their size and the current rules to their advantage. Being big is always a huge advantage over a start up.
with regards to both patent and copyright, you are right, for the consumer, these laws have neglegable benefit
Now that's not true. Copyright gives incentive to author's and other generator's of copy rightable material a financial incentive to produce them, and in theory it should improve the public commons in future. Patents do the same thing for inventors. Advancements are good for the consumer. Possibly not directly or immediatly, but they are good in the fullness of time. However, the current abuse of the system and other weirdism's in corporate behavior is harming the public consumer.
For the record, my opinion on the guy who is selling copies of the Ret Hat CD and upset about Red Hat asking him not to. What you're doing costs Red Hat money, and dilutes Red Hat's trade marked name. They have worked incredibly hard to build up the Red Hat brand, and they have a legal right to protect that investment.
It costs RedHat money to deal with the people who go believe they have support from RedHat. From people who call RedHat and want them to solve problems for them. Red Hat has to deal with those people and politely turn them away, telling them they don't own Red Hat. Then people start talking about the piss poor support Red Hat gave them. They'd purchased a reduced price copy from Red Hat, and then they wouldn't even support it. That costs them in terms of branding, and vendor reputation, which in a lot of ways is more valuable then money. The government prints money, and it has an extremely hard time building up trust with the public. Goodness knows I wouldn't want to have to build up the trust Red Hat has with the public.
While I understand that you want to promote Linux and make it nearly free for people to try, and that's great. It's a lot like over fishing a pond. You can ruin a perfectly good thing, by merely doing what you thought was fun without considering all of the long term affects. They want you to use you own name so those people associate the success or failure of their experience with you, not with Red Hat. This way Red Hat has control over the experice consumers have this things they associate with Red Hat.
Does this make it harder for you to let people try Linux out, yes. Is that Red Hat's problem? No.
I'd highly recommend you go *READ* the two books in question, "Writing Solid Code", and "Code Complete". Both of them are generic books about good old fashioned C code. Other then referencing MS projects they worked on (which I'm not sure if they do in those books, it's been 5 years since I read them). They clearly talk about using the assert/Assert/ASSERT macro's. The macro "assert" is standard, and it is standardized so that if you define NDEBUG it isn't in the code. I own a copy of the C++ standard. I know is in the C standard. This is merely a case of know your tools. Go read assert.h in/usr/include on a RH7.2 box. It acts precisely the same as poster described.
I wouldn't use a MS program if my life depended on it. I game on it at a friends house once a week, other then that, I never use the stupid things any more. If you're coding in C/C++ and don't realized the command line arguments you're passing the compiler, you're not a good craftsman, and don't know you tools. There's a reason I've read the entire gcc/g++ man pages, why I own the Using/Porting the gcc compiler by the FSF, and I've read it several times. I haven't use the MASM ever, let alone enough to know what the hell the segment alignment issue is. It's probably idiotic, and it the same reason I use the gcc compilers on all platforms. Including Cygwin and the OpenStep compilers 3 years ago when I worked on multiplatform code that had to run under windows.
Realize that not all things published by MS Press are marketing materials, and that they have some good advice in them about how to code. It's a flat out fact. They have zero to do with Microsoft products. Merely how to write good solid code that is easy to maintain and debug. They publish lots of good lessons that too many people learned the hard way.
If you insist on learning them the hard way, that's fine. I really couldn't care less. No evagelising here. Merely know you're tools. If he'd done the same thing in KDevelop, I'd still tell him to RTFM. KNOW YOUR TOOLS. If you don't know how your tools work, even if they're MS tools you should spend more time learning about your tools. It's time well invested. If you don't know how assert works, and you didn't read the implementation, and didn't know how to get the pre-processor output from you're compiler, maybe you should spend some time learning how to do that. It's very useful.
Trust me go read the books. They are very good, and you want have to wash you hands to get the MS feel of of them.
For the record, the three machines in my home, run Linux. I own official copies of RedHat 7.[0123], 6.[012], 5.2, and one from the 4 series. I have the boxed set of FreeBSD 4.4. Somewhere packed away in a box, I have an MS Win95 CD that came with my Pentium 100. On the last 6 machines I've had running in my apartment not a one of them, has ever had windows on it, ever. No MS troll here. My entire companys servers runs on Linux (they insist on Win98/2000 on the desktop, I run Linux on my machine), I'm posting from Mozilla. Free Software guy all the way. Sorry no MS troll. Go read the books. Go code. Come back when you get the fact that knowing you're tools, and how they work is important. If you don't get that, you're wasting your time.
Hmmm, I'm not sure exactly what you're implying, but MS shouldn't pay me money for any kind of promotion. Goodness knows I'd never use one of their software products for anything important.
I could supply good reference material on a number of programming topics, it's just that the MS Press ones are some of the best I know of on that topic. Some of the Extreme programming stuff has similar ideas, but I haven't read those too closely. I know that Large Scale C++ Programming has similar advice, but is more advanced. It also isn't nearly as "Do this, don't do that" advice. It's bigger picture not nuts and bolts. The Mythical Man Month, is one of the finest books about engineering project management I've ever read, but again not much in the way of practical everyday usable advice. Those come from a variety of publishers, and aren't as focused, is that less astroturf'ish?
I merely post my experince and point out honest to goodness good reference material, and it's astroturf'ing. Hmm, possibly it could be "grassroots", "friendly" advice, you know the thing that astroturfing is for simulates. Some people still point out information for free, with no reason other then to be helpful.... Granted my came with a flame for extra bonus.
However, after reading a number of your posts, you seem too cynical to believe that is the possible. Either way, my day job pays the bills so that I don't need to pick up change from MS for saying nice things about books they published 10-15 years ago. I'm also curious about you're sign-on, does Cricket or Liu give you a kick back on promoting their very fine book (hear the 4th edition is great, but I haven't picked it up yet, owning the 1, and 3rd seems enough for me, until I need to set up BIND 9)?
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, leasing and financing are all about cash management, they have very little to do with the value of the computers. That is, if you lease you nearly always get screwed. By the end of the lease you have pretty much paid for the computers but they take the computers away from you.
If you want to know the value get have the vendor quote out the price for leasing and buying up. Figure out the difference in the amount of money you have to hand them. You 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.
Now, if the lease costs as much (or more), or you believe the computers will have value after then end of the lease period, it's probably a buy situation.
Now there are some situations, like where I work, were we don't buy computers, we lease them, even though it's not cost effective by the standards I said before. The reason for this is cash management. It's in the best interest of the business to hold onto as much cash as possible because if it isn't cash flow positive (yet). So we hold onto the cash to keep the doors open as long as possible. Possibly the leasee will get screwed if we go bankrupt. Cash is king to a small business so we don't like giving it up until the last possible instant.
The other interesting issue with leasing is it gives you a lot of leverage. They still have to treat you well to get the money you haven't given them yet. Nice thing to have.
The reason you do financing is for two reasons. Either the deal isn't good enough on the lease, so you really want to buy them because it's a better value. So you go find a bank, get better loan terms from them, so the buy option w/ loan is better then the lease. Especially if you do a lot of business with a bank now, this makes a lot of sense. Now the bank has the equipment as collaterial, the terms are as good as buying, but better then leasing, and you haven't coughed up all the money up front.
The other reason to finance is because the company you want to buy equipment from doesn't do leasing. You can finance the computers and essentially lease them from the bank.
There's some other stuff I really don't understand (okay I understand it even less than what I just explained). Leasing has to be booked differently (as a monthly fixed expense I believe) which is good in the eyes of a lot of investors. Financing has to be booked as some variety of debt (effectively it's just a loan). Buying gets booked as a capital expense. All of this has a lot of tax implications, and accounting implications. Go find the person who does your books, make them help you make this decision. You're not a business guy, you shouldn't be making this decision. You should be spec'ing what you need, and who you want to do business with. The final decision as to what is the best value for the company as a whole is out of your realm of knowledge (and mine for that matter).
Normally all have buy options at the end of them. Be sure to get the buy option spelled out up front so if you need to keep the equipment because you haven't secured a replacement you can. Also find out what happens if you have to keep the equipment just one more month. Do you have to buy, or can you lease for just one more payment? Does the payment go up?
So all of this sums up to doing two things. Get all the options in front of you, figure out how much each one will cost you over the life of the computers. Now you know which one is "cheapest", you have to weigh when you are going to give up the money, and what makes the most sense from the business prospective. Leasing and Financing allow you to hold onto cash which in a lot of cases is more important then a marginal increase in cost to the business. Find the accountant/tax person, and have them help you with what makes the most financial sense above and beyond the merely technically implications of it.
Kirby
It's *MUCH* faster to generate bogus data, then it is to check it. I could generate thousands of work units in an hour. If I was a bad person, I'd sign up for a new name for every single work unit. Or only every 10-20 units. If I can turn them in faster then you can test and reject them, I'm winning. The DOS will actual work. Remember, they can't possibly afford to check 1 out of every million blocks of the data they are sending out, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it as a distributed computing project. I can DOS them if they attempt to run a "trusted" version of the binary locally. I'd whoop them really bad and generating bogus data. The attacker isn't going to play nice and put all their work units in under a single name if they are attempting to subvert the process.
I'm speaking from the perspective of an attacker who want's to subvert the process not rack up a big WU total. If I really wanted to rack up a huge work unit total, I'd take all my units under one name, and then submit them via 10 signed keys when they are done, so they all look like proper work units. Then they never check them locally, because they got verified by 10 different people as the same. How handy... If they have a set of "trusted" users that have to verify all the blocks, then all they should have the trusted people run the binaries, because everybody else will be throttled by the rate of the trusted ones.
In the end, they really can't check anything locally or only by trusted users, because locally and trusted users doesn't scale, that's why it's a distributed process. All the attacker has to do, is overrun the computing resources of the checker, and they win. It's not hard at all to pump to much data at them, because I don't need to do any real work to generate them, they have to do loads of work to check them. (Spoken like a man who use to grade tests.)...
Thanks,
Kirby
They also address this in the article if the cheaters can manipulate the system enough to ensure they get the same block twice and send it in twice they win. Plus 99% of all blocks have the same answer: Nope, no interesting data here. That's it. So a cheater just has to send in "Nothing of interest here", for 100K blocks, then request a new public key and do that again. They could wipe out huge chunks of the key space because eventually they will get verified as correct.
When you give source to anyone to run on their machine, you can't ever trust the results.
Kirby
I've submitted a request into the Oracle iTAR (Technical Assistance Request) system, at 3:00 AM, gotten a call back by 3:10AM, and a resolution by 3:45AM on a relatively esoteric bug. When I say, I get to hold Oracle accountable, I mean, I can hold Oracle accountable to get me up and running pronto with as much data as I'm going to get. It costs an arm and a leg, but the only people I've ever heard of who have lost their data using Oracle just didn't do backups properly. Oracle is pretty serious about keeping your data around. If you stay with stable tested versions, you'll be fine with Oracle.
I've had Oracle help me on de-supportted platforms, using non-standard configurations, doing crazyness of my own making. They always help me when I contact them for support. For production machines, I stay on the tried and true, but Oracle has never let me down in weird situations.
Oracle as a general rule, has *never* told me buzz off it's your fault. They stayed with me, and found it was my fault, and then showed me the doc's where it says I'm doing something that won't work. For all their faults, Oracle has *NEVER* failed me in any way when it comes to support. When it's my fault, I stand there and take it on the chin. However, as a backing store, Oracle will whoop anything I write eight ways to Sunday for speed, reliability, portability, quality, documentation and support. Hand's down. If you can afford it, there is no excuse for writting your own custom storage manager. If you can't afford it, try PostGreSQL. Oracle or PostGreSQL *WILL* be better for 99.9% of the cases out there. Google is one of the few examples of a situation where writting your own is probably a good idea.
For the record, out of the ~200 million records I've processed, I've lost 1, count'em 1 record using Oracle that was Oracle's fault (I've lost any number of them when Linux crashed, but that's my fault, not Oracle's). Even then Oracle clearly identified which one it was, and when it happened, so it was easy to recover.
Kirby
The reason we use the database instead of the filesystem is deathly simple. The database is god-like. I can do point it time recovery, and guarunttee that the database is completely consistant with the recovery point. If I had all that in a filesystem it'd be harder. It means I have hot-rollover capaibility from server to server, without having to duplicate my filesystem from machine to machine, I just let the hot archive logs deal with that. It means I have one backup system, and one failure recovery plan. It means all I have to monitor is the Oracle tablespace to ensure I don't run out of space. It means when I say "commit", I can hold Oracle accountable for ensuring the data is there, rather then having myself held accountable by the management.
If I was a good little boy and swallowed all the kool-aid, I'd use iFS (Oracle's Internet Filesystem) and it'd be all good. However, I don't I just use a huge array of blob's in my Oracle database.
Now that said, I have a remote filesystem that all of this data gets spooled to. Once spooled there it gets written to CD. Once the CD's are written, they are then used to find, compare, and if they match delete the blobs out of the Database. The CD then deletes the files out of the spool. Duplicate the CD, compare the two, send one offsite.
The other reason we use the database, that it's easier to deal with in our application, because writting a join against the filesystem is tricky...
Kirby
When I'm selling you a CD, and the terms of the agreement are, you don't get to give it to anyone else, then don't be surprised if I sue if you give it to people in violation of the contratual agreement. Even if they never would have paid me originally, they are not entitled to a free copy just because they won't agree to pay me. The ability to listen to music conveniently is not an entitlement. If I work selling my software out correctly, you will pay me for that CD, and I never have to work again if I can find enough people like you who will pay for it, and that's just fine in the USA. It's capitalism at work.
If you don't like the terms of the agreement, don't sign the contract. They have copyright for years. You have fair use, however, fair use isn't giving to anybody you want to. It might be giving it to your family. It is making a backup copy. It isn't giving to anybody who wouldn't willingly pay for it.
Kirby
I know the founding father's were great men, but they thought that black men should be counted as 2/5th's of a person. I'm sure they are wrong on the 2/5th's thing, and I'm it's entirely possible they are wrong on copyright. 99% of all works would end up falling back into the public domain after X or 2X years under my system, but don't under the current system. Essentially, anything left for dead is now in the public domain. Now the 1% that don't are probably the most popular works, the works that people would like to create new derivative works off. However, as long as the copyright holder is advancing the arts and science, I'm not sure why we need other people to do it. So you get access to the works in the original creator's lifetime, if they aren't advancing the work. So if Charles Shultz had stopped working on Snoopy 5 years after he started, somebody else could work on it in his lifetime. If he kept advancing it, he could continue to use it indefinitely. If he died, and somebody else kept it up, they could do it indefinitely.
I'm not sure why my language is confusing. I thought that copyright protected you from copying, and that works that are too similar are referred to as derivative works, and are against the law without permission (it's the language used in the GPL for example). They specifically defined derivative works. I'm using it as if it means, I can take you to a court of law and sue you for violation of my copyright (which has some legal standard I'm guessing, IANAL). Fair use are the rights you get even if the work is copyrighted. If I'm abusing the notation, happily correct me. You're the linguist.
No promotion of science and useful arts would seem to result from a person who didn't create any progress in the first place controlling a copyright on someone else's work.
Thus, I don't see how the extension of copyright after its holder's death as belonging to the original intent of the distribution monopoly.
In your first post, you claim you don't see promotion of the arts that result from extending copyright past the death of the creator. Making no distiguishment between recent or very old content created. I note the obvious benefit to the original creator to allowing it to pass on to their estate. I responded to what was actually written, not to what you thought you wrote. The fact that several people picked up on it, might be a sign you weren't clear.
From the parent of this:
I may or may not be correct, but at least argue the point that I actually made, and not some other one.
Sorry if I traveled a little far afield, I lost track of whom said what in the thread. Vinne_333 said this:
And children ... should probably learn how to earn their own living. I don't see why being the son of an author that had to work hard their whole life suddenly makes you able to sit on your ass your whole life.
Look up to the top post on this thread if I have it right, that's where he said it.
This attitude I find assine. It's a perfectly legitimate way to spend your life if you have the opportunity. God knows if I have kids, I'll be sure and try to arrange it that way. I lost track that you weren't the original poster (but you were the right depth to be him *grin* if he had replied to everone). So yes it was in the thread, I just didn't realize it wasn't you who stated originally. He argued roughly the same thing you did, on not seeing the value of extending copyright after the death of the creator. Sorry, should have replied directly to him.
I've got a mildly different take on copyright then you do. I know that copyright was a originally fixed term (I believe you could extend it also for 1 more fixed term of the same length). I think it should be "a fixed term from the last time the copyright holder extended the work". So if Disney keeps changing and extending that stupid mouse, I'm all for them keeping the damn thing forever. It really doesn't bother me. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Nope haven't done a thing with it in X (X less than 10-20) years, it's public domain now. Oh yeah, and you have to register it officially every time you extend it (not the original works, just the extensions). Notice that it's the copyright holder, so whoever holds the current copyright can extend it by creating a derived work (that be the son, the newphew, the other guy at the company, or the original author). So anyone who owns the copyright can continue to extend it to hold onto the copyright. It forces more works to be created in order to hold onto the copyright. I'd like to make it like a ball and chain, something that has to be done that will weigh on the copyright holder. Just imagine how much stuff Disney would be putting out in order to extend everything they've ever done. It'd be insane how much content they'd put out. They'd have to pick, new stuff, or let something old fall into the public domain because eventually they'd run out of resources to continually extend the copyrights on everything.
This system will let the people who want eternal rights over content to keep it if they work hard, and it will give up everything to the public domain that has been left dormant for X years. I don't think much else will ever pass Congress because Disney will buy them off if they can't hold onto the copyright of Steamboat Willie forever. If the courts don't reign in copyright, this is the only thing that will pass IMHO. Once in the public domain, the derived works can be re-copyrighted, but anyone is free to use the original public domain work as a basis for another non-infriging work. It'll force advancements, and it's irrelavent who does them to me, as long as they continue to happen. For extra bonus, make X get smaller, and smaller the longer and longer from the original copyright it is.
As to the removal of value, it's not misleading. You could wipe out an incredible amount of economic benefit, possibly the value of the last 2-5 years worth of work. It might have taken them 5 years to create something that would generate that 99% in the one year. They worked for 5 years of their life, seems reasonable the estate should get the benefit of it. It's not like writting the Great American Novel is a weekend project for most people. They work 5 years, finish send it off to the publisher for acceptance and drop dead. The estate gets no value because the creator died in between? So terminating copyright at death could in reality take away money the guy had earned, but hadn't yet recieved. It's just like saying, the window washer doesn't get paid until 5 years later, oh, and he's not alive then it's free. Just because he let you slide on paying doesn't mean you don't owe him if he dies. I think copyright should work the same way. You agree with me on it, but that's what I was getting at. So yes, it's a lot like taking away the money a person earns in the last 5 years of their life. They earned it, they just didn't collect on it yet. The economics of generating copyrightable work for yourself is very, very difficult to do, that's why they get copyrights to create a monopoly. That's the only way to make a living at it. They have different payment times, and when you get paid for the work relative to when you did the work are very different from hourly/salary workers.
Kirby
Well, that simple enough to explain. Any author who believes himself close to death now has zero incentive to produce any new work. If you were a window washer, you get paid presumable on net 30/net 60 terms, if not before you do the work. You die, your estate can still collect. Now, take an author for instance. If his work becomes public domain the instant he dies, he might lose out on a lot of the value in royalties.
I program for a living. If you told me my copyright on my programs would run out the moment I died, and as such would provide no economic value to my estate. I would get paid in royalties after my death, I have no incentive to work after the age of 55 or so. People in my family don't live that long. By that age, I'd rather spend my time with my family, instead of working hard to create a cool program that has zero economic value for the people I provide for.
Hell it's incentive to kill the author if you need to get access to his copyright. Stop and consider that one for a moment. It'd be in peoples best interest to start knocking people off who hold key copyrights. Run for cover if you've ever written a line of code used in the Linux kernel.
You have to protect the economic value for a reasonable time period after his death to provide value for his estate. I figure that you should get a monopoly for a minimum time, alive, dead, undead, re-animated whatever. What is being created has value to his estate, give it to the man, he did the work.
They give the monopoly to give incentive to create. Your talking about taking away his incentive. People work hard and try to provide for their families. There is nothing wrong with Junior getting the value his parent created. There is a problem however, in withholding the material from the public domain indefinitely.
If my father left me say 500Mil, and I could take that, put it in a regular old bank acount for 1% (any bank that didn't give me 3-4 even in this day and age is worthless), I'd get 5Mil a year. I after taxes I'd get 2Mil, I could live well off 50-75K easily, and grow the princepal by 1.9Mil a year. There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody bitches about that value being passed on (except the gov't, which wants 60% of the money even though it's already been taxed several times). Junior living off Dad's sweat. Who the hell are you to say it's not okay for his Dad to do that? The problem isn't Junior living off Dad's work. That's just fine in this country. In fact, it's part of the American Dream to provide for the future well being of your family. The problem is withholding the content from the public domain, not in junior living off Dad's sweat. Don't confused the two issues.
Remember, what your proposing is like taking away all the money somebody's made in the last 2-5 years prior to their death if the content takes 2-5 years to have viable economic value. That's a lot of incentive to not work if you think you'll die in the next 2-5 years. Author's create economic value in strange ways. We give them the gift of copyright so they will continue to do what they do best. Your taking away huge amounts of value, thus destroying the incentive of a lot of good highly experienced authors.
The other alternative is, now every copyright will be created on behalf of a corporation, which isn't a person, and never dies. Yes eventually it will run out, but I'd setup a corporation that I create all my content for, just so I could keep it the economic value around after I die. It'll cost me some money to setup, but it'll be well worth it for the additional value in my estate. Plus it is a good way to avoid estate taxes. All you do is keep all the money in the corporation, pay yourself a salary out of it. When you die, you have a lot less personal property, but the corporation has plenty....
Kirby
ISP's do the same thing. ISP's genearlly during peak times are using every single ounce of bandwidth they have if it is a pure bandwidth thing. They can pay at a percentage rate. So you take the 80-90% percential rate and then they pay thier fees based on that. Or it can be metered by the byte. So while a consumer bandwidth can be time shared, a always on server, is like living at the condo year round. You get to foot the whole bill.
Essentially, its just like business phones. Ever pay for a business phone? Where I live, Qwest will charge you 200-300 a month for a single business line, a home phone with the same services runs about $30-$50. Know why that is? A business phone on average gets 10 times as much use as a home phone during peak usage hours. The phone company has to build infrastructure for the peak times. Just like cell phone minutes during day minutes and night minutes.
If your trying to use up the "glut" of bandwidth on the consumer end, there isn't a glut... That's a fallacy... It's just that normally only 10-20% of your home customers are online at any given moment, so you can afford to over sell by 5-10 times....
The really ironic part about this, is the original poster said well, yeah, but it wouldn't be used by that many sites.... Which definitely isn't my idea of killer app....The basic premise of this is based on a false assumption that there is a "glut" of client side bandwith. There isn't, its just that the average home user doesn't use that much. When a home user wants 200K/s that's no big deal, because they'll only want it for an hour or two. When you stop using it, they'll sell it to your neighbor. When a production server needs 200K/s, they'll probably need it for 24hrs a day 7 days a week. That's why a 200K/s line to a server costs 10-100 times more then 200K/s service to your home.
Kirby
ISP's oversell capacity. Last I heard it was something like 5-10 to 1 on high quality ISP's. They over sell capacity by a lot. This over selling is why they can sell it to you cheap, because your only paying for 1/5 to 1/10th of the cost of the bandwidth. That's why getting a cable modem is cheap, and getting a server hooked up at 1/10th the speed is more expensive.
So I'll say it this way... If you're trying to use spare bandwidth from users to serve pages to other users, especially if they are off your local ISP, you will ruin the good thing we have going. We get bandwidth cheaper then we should as a consumer precisely because the content providers pay so much, because an average end user doesn't use that much bandwidth. If you break that up, you realize you'll get to pay server prices for your bandwidth right?
If your structuring your P2P that way, it'll be a killer app. It'll kill the pricing scheme of consumer bandwidth.
Kirby
Squid solves the problem either by setting the brower up to use it as a proxy, or by setting up the a router to your upstream provider to transparently re-direct traffic to port 80 to a local squid server. So if anyone on your downside link attempts to hit the same page twice, you'll have no traffic leaves the network. Now your upstream ISP does the same thing. Now the upstream provider to them can do the same thing. The upstream provider from them can do the same thing, all the way to the backbone providers. So essentially, you pass thru various levels of proxying servers to get the content you want. Ummm, this sounds like a lot of Web Servers clusters passing around pages from other servers near them so you don't have to go to directly to the site. Which I'll bet money is paraphrasing your ideal P2P setup for web page delivery. Deployment of squid servers located on every Tier 1,2, and 3 bandwidth providers would look precisely like your P2P solution unless I miss my guess. This would mean when you asked for content, you'd only go upstream to the place it has been close to previously.
It's identical the caching layers in a CPU. First you look in the L1 cache, then you look in the L2 cache, then you go L3 cache. Now you look in RAM, if it isn't there you look on disk. If you've got HSM (heirarchical storage management), you look on tape.
How does this make a site cheaper... Well Akaima is cheaper then enough bandwidth to serve the pages yourself (if your big enough). It's cheaper, because you don't need nearly the bandwith, and Akaima already is huge, thus having economy of scale so they turn a profit on it, while saving you money.
Assuming everyone runs a Squid Cache at the various levels as described above, you'll only get 1 hit per page on your website ever until the cached copy expires on your backbone providers Squid Cache. You have the 11 backbone providers talk directly to each others squid caches. When provider A wants a page from provider B it asks the squid cache of provider B, the squid cache goes to your site gets the page and caches it. From now one, anyone who wants your page will get it from the backbone provider who routes you onto the internet at large. Stop and think about it, you could be getting viewed by ever slashdotter in the world, and see a single hit.
As long as the core caches have enough disk, so you don't get flushed out, you only need enough bandwith to do just that. That's it. You only need enough bandwidth to ensure that your pages can get to the core squid cache quickly enough for the first view not to die of bordom, and that's it.
Of course you run a pretty dull site, beings that you only have a static site. It doesn't work for dynamic content that depends on user level information, but then again neither would P2P.
Actually, I'm not enough of a squid expert to say that for certain. You might get 11 hits per page, one for each backbone provider now that I think about it. Still not an overwhelming amount of traffic.
Now it's time to talk reality... The backbone providers don't want to do that.... It'll save you money, and cost them money because you pay them. However, there is nothing to stop a group of people running clusters of Squid caching servers to do this for themselves. So it's doubtful it'll ever get deployed. It however is a solved problem.
As an aside, bandwidth is expensive because it's expensive. Running a website will *ALWAYS* be expensive. The core providers will always charge a premium price for it because they are providing a rare service you can't get from very many people. They charge a premium price because you'll pay it,and nobody will offer it to you for less. It's that simple... Build all the tools you want, and running a site will still cost the same amount.
Kirby
Okay, now P2P to solve multi-cast routing of streaming live content like movies and audio broadcasts so if 50 people on a single ISP are watching a football game broadcast over the internet live efficiently that's cool. Web pages are trivial. ISP's, businesses, colleges, have all solved this problem for the end consumer. Shit, you can't go to www.yahoo.com anymore without hitting an Akaima server. All cable modem providers in my area use transparent squid proxies to speed up web browsing.
If P2P's big goal is to solve a trivial problem solved by the HTTP 1.1 spec, in conjunction with a couple of Open Source products, plus a couple of large business, I'd say P2P is about 3 years behind the times....
That said, P2P has some cool applications and will solve some cool problems, I don't think Web pages is one of them.
Kirby
Using M4 or some other preprocessor should alleviate a lot of the problems. You can use it to preprocess the code, before it gets to the C preprocessor. Possibly use a version of C-front, which outputs C code from C++, then just compile the C it outputs. Some of the C-front compilers support inlining no problem. Otherwise, it's relatively simple to follow the rules to make using straight C macros not be dangerous. Everything you pass to a macro is a locally declared variable, with no expressions, and it'll act just the way you want. It's a pain in the ass to remember, but then again, you are writting an embedded system.
Ummm, I think they are fighting to have it have the copyright lowered to something similar to the lifetime of the author. Even if they do from the date it's published until 30 years later, that should end up being 30 years you have ample time to make money off of the work. What they are fighting is that major corporations are fighting for copyright indefinitely. Take Disney for example. Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse... Disney died sometime in the 60's. Walt made all the money he was ever going to make and enjoy by the day he died. Yes his family has some rights to his creation. However, the corporation at large has been living off that stupid mouse for 40 years after his death. They are fighting to have copyright made into a full blown right indefinitely. Right now, me at the age of 25, if I create something, I have the copyright on it, until at least the year 2077. Assuming I live another 60 years, that's 2137 before it's public domain. That's nearly two lifetimes. It'll 12 generations before it'll ever be in the public domain. It's too long. Copyright is there to enable progress, not to give a monopoly to the creator of the content.
They won't let you post an ISO, that's just the same as the OpenBSD guys copyrighting it, rather then putting it out under the BSD license...
It's just like RedHat saying you can't redistribute a RedHat ISO as a RedHat CD. That's not a GPL violation, you are violating their trademark.
The only way they it can be a GPL violation is they don't let you send out the source code to anybody you want to. That's the only piece the GPL applied to. If the NDA says you can't send either the ISO's or the binaries, they are in the clear to the best of my IANAL knowledge.
Kirby
I went and poked around some more, you might be right. It looks like they have several levels of support, one of which is some crappy shrink wrapped software. Not much it can do for broken drives. The other is a cleanroom pull apart setup like what I mentioned...
To be honest, they are idiots if they can't get enough of the filesystem off of there. I'd put money on the fact, that xfs and jfs are no better supported then Reiser. Reiser I believe is at least a secondary install choice on Suse Linux. I believe XFS is only the on the SGI rebranded RedHat. Meanwhile, I don't believe JFS is used by default on any system.
If they can physically pull what use to be the bits on the disk, with any reliability at all (which if they can't it's useless). At that point, I should be able to mount and retrieve a lot of data. That in and of itself would be of extreme value to the poster. Then you should be able to handily mount/fsck it, and get the data. I know I've done it before. Never with ReiserFS, but with ext2 on a drive that was fried on certain sections. Just used mount and tar, and I was done, I got 95% of the data off just with that. I'm not sure which of those groups they are, but all things considered just pulling the bits from the disk should be more then enough assuming the media isn't just totally fried to get the majority of the information off the disk.
Assuming you can find one of them, use google for gods sake. Get them to read the drive linearly. At this point, they should be able to put each drive onto new drives for you. Build a raidtab that matches the new drives they give you, do raidstart /dev/mdXX, do a fsck.reiserfs on it. Mount the thing. Poof like magic you have data again.
I've heard of several people recovering Ph.d and masters disertations this way. It's why the DoD has such strict standards about destruction and disposal of a hard drive. It's very difficult to delete data from a drive so it can't be recovered. It's can just get out of control expensive to recover the data.
If it's worth $5-10K, and you can deal without having it for several days, this might actually work... If the company bitches, just tell that it's about what a good tape setup would have cost if they had bought one.
The two guys who said try stripping the electronics are pretty brave SOB's, but that might be worth trying if you can't spring for some experts to deal with that for you.
Kirby
Second, readup on the history of NASA. The book by Krantz is very instructive. NASA has a history of generating overly redundant systems. Way overly redundant systems. That's why they've lost more astronauts flying them around in little planes they they have lost while flying them to anywhere else. NASA didn't know a lot of stuff, and didn't have very good testing before stuff when into space. They just built it to survive lots worse conditions then the worst they thought it could ever be. The major problems they had lately is that Congress wants, soon, quality, and cheap. Every good Engineer knows you only get two, and then only if your really good and really lucky...
While agree with you, NASA's stuff right now is hardened and tested and known working. They got it harded, tested and known working, without losing a single person in space. Yes they have lost some during testing on the ground. Yes they lost the Challenger, and 7 astronauts, but that wasn't faulty software, that was faulty management not listening to the world class Engineers who knew something was wrong.
Kirby
I've used the latest versions of Open Office downloaded the tar balls and installed. Sorry it just isn't there yet. The office sheet can't open most of the stuff that is published at work using MS Office. Thank all things good for printing to postscript/pdf's so I can read it.
The spreadsheet in it is pathetic in terms of formulas and mathmatical functions. I used the stuff I learned 12 years ago on the Apple IIgs and that works. However, when attempting to do simple date manipulations, or complex lookups, or any number of other useful features, it fell flat on it's face. It has a bug where I always have to set the cell size, because it picks an infinitely thin cell size on my machine. I'm pretty sure it's my fault, I just can't find a resolution for it.
I've had it crash on a 500 Cell spreadsheet I created and only ever edited in OO. It's nice, but it isn't ready for primetime, even for a regular user.
It's not office inter-operable. You're an early adaptor, and it's good enough for you. It's not good enough for work, it's not good enough for power users. When it is, it'll be heaven on earth, but it isn't. Just like Linux wasn't ready in the 1.2 kernel series to be a production database server. Yeah, it could route, it could do Samba. It could deliver e-mail. FTP, or web services. It just will take time for it to be ready for a serious beating that the general public will put on it.
For the record, I felt similarly about Mozilla around 0.9 or so. It just wasn't ready. I now refused to use anything but Mozilla. It has come a long way.
Open Office has a long way to go. MS Office has several years on Open Office. Open Office has a lot of crash happiness in it, but they'll fix it.
Kirby
Now when you add to that Mozilla finally has come around to being high quality. It'd mean Linux finally has the 3 of the last 4 major (Word Processor, SpreadSheet, Web Browsing are the new ones, it's had decent e-mail forever) killer apps that Windows has had for 5-10 years.
It'd mean I could buy my Mom a machine for $400, and put all free (as in beer) software on it, and she'd be happy if OpenOffice we're good enough.
Linux is grand and glorious, but it's a Server OS. It's based on a Server OS, it'll always be a Server OS. OS X is the first UNIX like OS that has a real quality desktop with full application inter-operability with the MS Suite. If Open Office could do that, it'd move a number of UNIX platforms into that category. Not being in that category will move you right off the list of desktop OS'es at every single place I've ever worked. Yeah the developers use it but that's it.
For that matter, screw Linux. Lets just talk about on the Windows platform. Do you know how much money is pissed away on licensing for Office? I think it's something on the order of 2-3 Billion dollars a year. That represents an incredibly amount of economic resources spent on this one little thing. I know MS does get it, and does good things for the economy, but personally, I'd rather see that money used by the business for developing their business rather then giving it all to a single company (even if it wasn't MS). Freeing people up from the burden of paying for a high quality office suite, would have incredible impact on the economics of computing. Probably more so then Linux ever has or will. A free high quality word processor that was cross platform would be a much bigger deal to people outside of the IT industry then Linux ever will be.
It'll take forever, just like people believing in Linux. Just step back and remember where Linux was in 1993/4. Lets see RedHat had just released it's first edition. SLS and Slackware were king of the distribution Hill. People had heard of it, but nobody actually used it publically. Open Office is probably in the same boat. Yet it works, its good, but not good enough to base a business on just yet. It'll get there. It could easily grow to have a much larger user base then Linux does. It could easily make Linux look like small potatoes to be honest. Because the set of people who need a UNIX like OS is much smaller then the set of people who need to be able to reliable create new content, and generate valuable information on a spreadsheet.
Neither Emacs nor LaTeX has any chance of filling that niche for the general public. They've been around long enough that if they we're going to, we'd have seen a lot more push in that direction by now.
Kirby
Because you have to stand on the shoulder's of the giants before you, it's nearly impossible to do patent a new idea in high technology.
Big business has just figured out how to user their size and the current rules to their advantage. Being big is always a huge advantage over a start up.
with regards to both patent and copyright, you are right, for the consumer, these laws have neglegable benefit
Now that's not true. Copyright gives incentive to author's and other generator's of copy rightable material a financial incentive to produce them, and in theory it should improve the public commons in future. Patents do the same thing for inventors. Advancements are good for the consumer. Possibly not directly or immediatly, but they are good in the fullness of time. However, the current abuse of the system and other weirdism's in corporate behavior is harming the public consumer.
For the record, my opinion on the guy who is selling copies of the Ret Hat CD and upset about Red Hat asking him not to. What you're doing costs Red Hat money, and dilutes Red Hat's trade marked name. They have worked incredibly hard to build up the Red Hat brand, and they have a legal right to protect that investment.
It costs RedHat money to deal with the people who go believe they have support from RedHat. From people who call RedHat and want them to solve problems for them. Red Hat has to deal with those people and politely turn them away, telling them they don't own Red Hat. Then people start talking about the piss poor support Red Hat gave them. They'd purchased a reduced price copy from Red Hat, and then they wouldn't even support it. That costs them in terms of branding, and vendor reputation, which in a lot of ways is more valuable then money. The government prints money, and it has an extremely hard time building up trust with the public. Goodness knows I wouldn't want to have to build up the trust Red Hat has with the public.
While I understand that you want to promote Linux and make it nearly free for people to try, and that's great. It's a lot like over fishing a pond. You can ruin a perfectly good thing, by merely doing what you thought was fun without considering all of the long term affects. They want you to use you own name so those people associate the success or failure of their experience with you, not with Red Hat. This way Red Hat has control over the experice consumers have this things they associate with Red Hat.
Does this make it harder for you to let people try Linux out, yes. Is that Red Hat's problem? No.
Kirby
I wouldn't use a MS program if my life depended on it. I game on it at a friends house once a week, other then that, I never use the stupid things any more. If you're coding in C/C++ and don't realized the command line arguments you're passing the compiler, you're not a good craftsman, and don't know you tools. There's a reason I've read the entire gcc/g++ man pages, why I own the Using/Porting the gcc compiler by the FSF, and I've read it several times. I haven't use the MASM ever, let alone enough to know what the hell the segment alignment issue is. It's probably idiotic, and it the same reason I use the gcc compilers on all platforms. Including Cygwin and the OpenStep compilers 3 years ago when I worked on multiplatform code that had to run under windows.
Realize that not all things published by MS Press are marketing materials, and that they have some good advice in them about how to code. It's a flat out fact. They have zero to do with Microsoft products. Merely how to write good solid code that is easy to maintain and debug. They publish lots of good lessons that too many people learned the hard way.
If you insist on learning them the hard way, that's fine. I really couldn't care less. No evagelising here. Merely know you're tools. If he'd done the same thing in KDevelop, I'd still tell him to RTFM. KNOW YOUR TOOLS. If you don't know how your tools work, even if they're MS tools you should spend more time learning about your tools. It's time well invested. If you don't know how assert works, and you didn't read the implementation, and didn't know how to get the pre-processor output from you're compiler, maybe you should spend some time learning how to do that. It's very useful.
Trust me go read the books. They are very good, and you want have to wash you hands to get the MS feel of of them.
For the record, the three machines in my home, run Linux. I own official copies of RedHat 7.[0123], 6.[012], 5.2, and one from the 4 series. I have the boxed set of FreeBSD 4.4. Somewhere packed away in a box, I have an MS Win95 CD that came with my Pentium 100. On the last 6 machines I've had running in my apartment not a one of them, has ever had windows on it, ever. No MS troll here. My entire companys servers runs on Linux (they insist on Win98/2000 on the desktop, I run Linux on my machine), I'm posting from Mozilla. Free Software guy all the way. Sorry no MS troll. Go read the books. Go code. Come back when you get the fact that knowing you're tools, and how they work is important. If you don't get that, you're wasting your time.
Kirby
I could supply good reference material on a number of programming topics, it's just that the MS Press ones are some of the best I know of on that topic. Some of the Extreme programming stuff has similar ideas, but I haven't read those too closely. I know that Large Scale C++ Programming has similar advice, but is more advanced. It also isn't nearly as "Do this, don't do that" advice. It's bigger picture not nuts and bolts. The Mythical Man Month, is one of the finest books about engineering project management I've ever read, but again not much in the way of practical everyday usable advice. Those come from a variety of publishers, and aren't as focused, is that less astroturf'ish?
I merely post my experince and point out honest to goodness good reference material, and it's astroturf'ing. Hmm, possibly it could be "grassroots", "friendly" advice, you know the thing that astroturfing is for simulates. Some people still point out information for free, with no reason other then to be helpful.... Granted my came with a flame for extra bonus.
However, after reading a number of your posts, you seem too cynical to believe that is the possible. Either way, my day job pays the bills so that I don't need to pick up change from MS for saying nice things about books they published 10-15 years ago. I'm also curious about you're sign-on, does Cricket or Liu give you a kick back on promoting their very fine book (hear the 4th edition is great, but I haven't picked it up yet, owning the 1, and 3rd seems enough for me, until I need to set up BIND 9)?
Kirby