So... Basicly what you are saying in this post is that cutting the price down to 3% of what they are currently asking would make more people buy the machines? Pure genius.
So, you're suggesting a bloody revolution then? I get somewhat annoyed with the political nihilism that people love to express around here, it is in no way interesting or constructive.
While I don't want to be a don't-complain-if-you-don't-have-a-solution-guy, this kind of complaint suggests that the whole system as we know it is hopeless. Without any idea what a system that would work would be like (or at least a vote for anarchy) the complaint is pointless.
Compare; "I think all modes of transportation that exists suck".
I don't see any reason to stay off a historical fact just because it made someone look stupid. If you are this easily offended by things you read in articles I must suggest that you stay off the internet.
Things would be different if the statement was in any way controversial, but as things stand now everyone already knows it to be true.
That is exactly my argument against Gentoo. Why bother compiling every single little application and library with tons of optimization when it is really only ever a few specific applications that will really have any effect on performance?
It is the good old 90/10 rule for optimization, 90% of the time is spent in 10% of the code, there is pretty much nothing to be gained from optimizing most stuff since the bottlenecks are always very local.
Unfortunately the servers don't come with little stickers "Will handle n WoW clients!".
This is a matter of scaling and finding bottlenecks in a huge complex system. Seems a lot of people don't uderstand that it is largely impossible to predict the behaviour of a sufficiently complex system (this one has huge social factors involved too, how will players distribute themselves among the servers for example?) without actually just going there and measuring.
As I said one should not really look at these statistics as much of a guide since they are so different games. For reference however Final Fantasy X sold 2.1 million copies on its first day. Very hard to beat the FF games when it comes to raw sales.
Compared to other MMORPG's in concurrent users. So while it does then probably beat Everquest in that category it is no match in numbers to the Final Fantasy games (40 million units, FF7 alone sold 9 million) and Starcraft (3.5 million units).
The statistics are in no way comparable though, with MMORPG's being subscription services and everything.
SCO's falling has little to do with the management really, the writing has been on the wall for years. They haven't had a single even moderatly interesting product since the x86 BSD's and Linux became viable.
True enough, can't just invent it oneself. But the point here is; Microsoft is in a good technical position to make a clustered computation system. It is also most likely so that for the average user the extra configurability of Linux is fairly useless (how many people have significantly changed the Linux kernel in some way? The basic compilation settings are mostly stuff that are configurable in NT by other means anyway).
I am not saying that Linux is a worse deal in any way of course, it just does not have any real technical advantage for this specific use. On the non-technical side it is still cheaper and the added control over it gives a nice safety (also the clustering software is already here, maturity will most likely count for something for quite a few years). Claiming that the NT kernel is unmodular and an unsound base for a clustering system is just wrong though.
This has to be some sort of world record in bullshitting, the NT kernel is easily as modular and flexible as the Linux kernel. Microsoft can easily strip and optimize the kernel (the xbox is an excellent already-existing example, great use of the NT kernel).
A number of years ago it was possible to actually listen to technical arguments on slashdot, but it seems that all technical considerations has been deemed less important than slamming Microsoft at every turn.
NT will work great in such a setting, if anything it is the historic WIN32 GUI stuff on top that is holding it back.
The NT kernel is modular and well-design, I can't imagine that it would be more troublesome than it was for Linux (and probably significantly less work).
I have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to networking and security in NT, sure the WIN32 part is troublesome to keep secure, but NT in itself has no such problems.
I would distrust a poll to a far greater extent than user agent information, Slashdot is a Linux-pride site of great proportions, people will tend to answer Linux even when it is not really true.
You know how it works; Dual-booters will answer Linux despite being in Windows. People with multiple machines will answer Linux refusing to admit it if they actually use Windows more. People who have a Linux server with a ssh session active will answer Linux despite surfing in from a Windows desktop. The casual Fedora user who according to themselves just havent gotten around installing Linux again since they replaced their harddrive... There is prestige in using Linux here, most of Slashdot uses Windows, but most of it would also like to pretend that they arent.
To put it the proper way: Slashdot is mostly made up of posers.
While the numbers might not be absolutely correct I consider the suggestion that the vast majority of Linux users have set up their browser to identify it as a recent version of Firefox running on Windows moronic.
Feel free to link me to a few sites that refuse to let people running Linux in based on the operating system alone.
It is one thing to say that IE's market dominance can follow from false user agent tags, but since so very few browsers in this particular sampling set report themselves as IE (or anything else that is commonly accepted by stupid websites) I highly doubt that anyone has gone out of their way to change the operating system given without changing the browser to one of the ones that will work on all websites.
To reiterate: 11% report themselves to be MSIE
65% report themselves to be on Windows
23% report themselves to be Linux
Conclusion: There are a lot more Windows users on Slashdot OR most Linux users change their user-agent tags in pointless ways. Or to phrase it this way; Either there are few Linux users or the many Linux users are stupid.
Ah, the classic knee-jerk answer. Unfortunate then that he did in fact list user agent statistics too? Showing MSIE at a rather unimpressive 11% compared to Windows at 65%.
Just the looks on the faces of the Apple repair shop workers when you bring in a completely new Macintosh model alone would be worth the effort to do this whole hack.
A tracker for a copyrighted file has only one purpose in existance, to facilitate the illegal copying of copyrighted content. There is no other use in any way, the intent is clear. Also, the hosts providing the file are not there for their own reasons, they are their solely for the purpose of getting downloads directed to them from the tracker. The tracker not only has the illegal download as its only purpose, all the downloading in that swarm of hosts is also directly dependant on the tracker. The fact that the tracekr does not have the file is just an uninteresting technicality.
Google just indexes all information it comes across on a public network, it has a clear common carrier status (though the caching might also have issues when the content cached is removed). Even when it directs to an illegal download the download does not really rely on google, google is just an arbitrary unrelated agent.
That was the whole point, while other hosts are involved the tracker is there as the root of the network, its whole purpose to organize the hosts so that one can recreate the original file.
As I said I don't know if it really is illegal, but the intent of the law is fairly clear, the tracker distinction is just a technicality.
The point of the argument was that I don't think it should matter what the tracker has, it should matter what the tracker is there to do. So I am saying:
The tracker has only one single purpose, to make illegal to download file A downloadable for users.
While the tracker does not have the file the hosts that do the distribution only do so under the organisation of the tracker.
Trackers typically have some initial seed locally arranged, needed to get the whole thing going. On most sites the seed also stays around to make sure that no fragment ends up lost.
Either way I can't say that I think it is obvious in any way that it should be legal to keep a tracker just because it does not actually hold the file. Its only purpose in existance is to provide access to the file, and also, the hashes that it keeps are generated from the file. While some people are tempted to compare the trackers information to plain linking I think it is a flawed argument. While the tracker only points out where each file fragment is available from the pointed to hosts are not there for any other purpose than to be pointed out by the tracker. They are if you will not really practically reachable in any other way. In that sense one can just as well see the tracker as an integral component in a system that as a whole is illegal.
That is what I am pondering, the only purpose for a tracker handling a file that is illegal to download is to download the illegal file. Question is how this looks from a legal standpoint. Personally I feel that in the interest of consistency it should be illegal, it is just a loophole (I could provide illegal downloads by giving out a long list of indexes of bytes in the slashdot frontpage HTML source, then one can download the index-list, the frontpage and recreate the illegal file, I don't provide the actual bytes in the same sense that the tracker doesn't).
About the HTTP/FTP comparison I were thinking about all the tracker sites that also provides a base seed (the majority of them), once they seed the torrent they are in the same situation as a provider of a FTP site at least.
I really don't see the problem here, other P2P apps are tricky since the users themselves make the content available, but with BitTorrent it should be very clear-cut who to complain to if content you own show up as a download; the tracker.
The tracker is what facilitates the download, the person who runs the tracker has set it up with the intent to share the specific file being shared. The tracker site is typically also the root of all the sharing through being a base seeder as well. So, basicly this brings things back to the days of piracy over public FTP and HTTP download sites, just attack the one facilitating the downloads. While foreign hosting and such might make this trickier it sure is way simpler than trying to attack the typical P2P network where the users are also the ones bringing the content to the table.
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Take for instance Microsoft. Ten years ago it was the icon of geekhood, they made a really good compiler, assembler and whatnot.
What? Are you trying to rewrite history in some way? I would say that the acceptance of Microsoft products have never really been higher than it is today. All OS's they had before 2k were disgraces. XP is popular and far from the resource hog slashdotters like to pretend that it is (have a look at any other desktop environment), in fact the system requirement leap between 2k and XP was far smaller than many jumps before when factoring in the progress of hardware. I don't see anything wrong with the current development tools that Microsoft has either (in fact, they too sure seem to be better today than they have ever before been).
Really, the last five years of Microsoft products have done a lot to convince me that MS knows what they are doing, Linux seems further from being able to conquer the desktop market today than it did in 1999.
Big or not it is still another feature to add to the very small set of features that OpenOffice has and Office lacks. Makes it a somewhat more meaningful project.
Slashdot Mirror
So... Basicly what you are saying in this post is that cutting the price down to 3% of what they are currently asking would make more people buy the machines? Pure genius.
Compare; "I think all modes of transportation that exists suck".
Things would be different if the statement was in any way controversial, but as things stand now everyone already knows it to be true.
It is the good old 90/10 rule for optimization, 90% of the time is spent in 10% of the code, there is pretty much nothing to be gained from optimizing most stuff since the bottlenecks are always very local.
I guess this might have been funny if they werent making (a tiny granted) profit and have never been in much debt.
Being 32 bit is not a deal-breaker for 98% of the market at this point.
This is a matter of scaling and finding bottlenecks in a huge complex system. Seems a lot of people don't uderstand that it is largely impossible to predict the behaviour of a sufficiently complex system (this one has huge social factors involved too, how will players distribute themselves among the servers for example?) without actually just going there and measuring.
As I said one should not really look at these statistics as much of a guide since they are so different games. For reference however Final Fantasy X sold 2.1 million copies on its first day. Very hard to beat the FF games when it comes to raw sales.
The statistics are in no way comparable though, with MMORPG's being subscription services and everything.
SCO's falling has little to do with the management really, the writing has been on the wall for years. They haven't had a single even moderatly interesting product since the x86 BSD's and Linux became viable.
I am not saying that Linux is a worse deal in any way of course, it just does not have any real technical advantage for this specific use. On the non-technical side it is still cheaper and the added control over it gives a nice safety (also the clustering software is already here, maturity will most likely count for something for quite a few years). Claiming that the NT kernel is unmodular and an unsound base for a clustering system is just wrong though.
A number of years ago it was possible to actually listen to technical arguments on slashdot, but it seems that all technical considerations has been deemed less important than slamming Microsoft at every turn.
NT will work great in such a setting, if anything it is the historic WIN32 GUI stuff on top that is holding it back.
I have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to networking and security in NT, sure the WIN32 part is troublesome to keep secure, but NT in itself has no such problems.
You know how it works; Dual-booters will answer Linux despite being in Windows. People with multiple machines will answer Linux refusing to admit it if they actually use Windows more. People who have a Linux server with a ssh session active will answer Linux despite surfing in from a Windows desktop. The casual Fedora user who according to themselves just havent gotten around installing Linux again since they replaced their harddrive... There is prestige in using Linux here, most of Slashdot uses Windows, but most of it would also like to pretend that they arent.
To put it the proper way: Slashdot is mostly made up of posers.
Feel free to link me to a few sites that refuse to let people running Linux in based on the operating system alone.
It is one thing to say that IE's market dominance can follow from false user agent tags, but since so very few browsers in this particular sampling set report themselves as IE (or anything else that is commonly accepted by stupid websites) I highly doubt that anyone has gone out of their way to change the operating system given without changing the browser to one of the ones that will work on all websites.
To reiterate:
11% report themselves to be MSIE
65% report themselves to be on Windows
23% report themselves to be Linux
Conclusion: There are a lot more Windows users on Slashdot OR most Linux users change their user-agent tags in pointless ways. Or to phrase it this way; Either there are few Linux users or the many Linux users are stupid.
Ah, the classic knee-jerk answer. Unfortunate then that he did in fact list user agent statistics too? Showing MSIE at a rather unimpressive 11% compared to Windows at 65%.
About as likely as Winzip Inc. buying Microsoft.
Just the looks on the faces of the Apple repair shop workers when you bring in a completely new Macintosh model alone would be worth the effort to do this whole hack.
Google just indexes all information it comes across on a public network, it has a clear common carrier status (though the caching might also have issues when the content cached is removed). Even when it directs to an illegal download the download does not really rely on google, google is just an arbitrary unrelated agent.
The Google analogy is completely misdirected.
As I said I don't know if it really is illegal, but the intent of the law is fairly clear, the tracker distinction is just a technicality.
The point of the argument was that I don't think it should matter what the tracker has, it should matter what the tracker is there to do. So I am saying:
The tracker has only one single purpose, to make illegal to download file A downloadable for users.
While the tracker does not have the file the hosts that do the distribution only do so under the organisation of the tracker.
Either way I can't say that I think it is obvious in any way that it should be legal to keep a tracker just because it does not actually hold the file. Its only purpose in existance is to provide access to the file, and also, the hashes that it keeps are generated from the file. While some people are tempted to compare the trackers information to plain linking I think it is a flawed argument. While the tracker only points out where each file fragment is available from the pointed to hosts are not there for any other purpose than to be pointed out by the tracker. They are if you will not really practically reachable in any other way. In that sense one can just as well see the tracker as an integral component in a system that as a whole is illegal.
About the HTTP/FTP comparison I were thinking about all the tracker sites that also provides a base seed (the majority of them), once they seed the torrent they are in the same situation as a provider of a FTP site at least.
The tracker is what facilitates the download, the person who runs the tracker has set it up with the intent to share the specific file being shared. The tracker site is typically also the root of all the sharing through being a base seeder as well. So, basicly this brings things back to the days of piracy over public FTP and HTTP download sites, just attack the one facilitating the downloads. While foreign hosting and such might make this trickier it sure is way simpler than trying to attack the typical P2P network where the users are also the ones bringing the content to the table.
What? Are you trying to rewrite history in some way? I would say that the acceptance of Microsoft products have never really been higher than it is today. All OS's they had before 2k were disgraces. XP is popular and far from the resource hog slashdotters like to pretend that it is (have a look at any other desktop environment), in fact the system requirement leap between 2k and XP was far smaller than many jumps before when factoring in the progress of hardware. I don't see anything wrong with the current development tools that Microsoft has either (in fact, they too sure seem to be better today than they have ever before been).
Really, the last five years of Microsoft products have done a lot to convince me that MS knows what they are doing, Linux seems further from being able to conquer the desktop market today than it did in 1999.
Big or not it is still another feature to add to the very small set of features that OpenOffice has and Office lacks. Makes it a somewhat more meaningful project.