Ummm... someone gets a virus on my box, then convinces my ISP that I dowloaded a whole bunch of crap, then I get a huge bill, then I have to prove I didn't download?
Ummm... but you did download it. If someone runs an extension cord from one of your outside outlets to power their woodshop, you're going to get a big bill from the power company too. The argument "no I didn't, the guy next door did" just ain't gonna fly.
In the real world bandwidth costs money, just like electricity and water. If you don't take precautions against people leeching off your pipe, whose fault is that?
As for that potential urban legend, I have heard that twisted so many ways I don't know for sure anymore. You'd probably have to ask the guys directly, at this point.:)
It's not an urban legend. In "Weaving the Web", Tim Berners-Lee explicitly states
I never intended HTML source code (the stuff with the angle brackets) to be seen by users. A browser/editor would let a user simply view or edit the language of a page of hypertext, as if he were using a word processor. The idea of asking people to write the angle brackets by hand was to me, and I assumed to many, as unacceptable as asking one to prepare a Microsoft Word document by writing out its binary coded format.
This isn't exactly new research. Studies on calorie restriction have been done for decades, and a real-world study was acidentally done in Biosphere II several years back when they couldn't produce as much food as they predicted. Dr. Roy Walford has written a popular book or two on the subject, and he sells a nutritional program called DWIDP to help with the diet. (I actually got my first real programming experience with Java back in 1998 writing my own CR software that used nutritional data from the USDA database, because DWIDP was pretty buggy.) There used to be a CR mailing list called cran@something-or-other for people who were actively doing it; for all I know it's still around.
The good: It really does have a significant impact on health. At my lowest weight I was down to around 115 pounds. At 5'8" with a medium build, this put me 25-30 pounds below "normal" weight. I was *really* thin back then--people would regularly comment on it, and sometimes it was a little difficult to convince people I wasn't anorexic. However, my health was *really* good. I got regular checkups, and ended up educating the doctor on CR because he was a bit surprised at how healthy I was. Blood pressure, resting heart rate, and cholesterol levels were extraordinary for someone who only rarely exercised.
The bad: It's *hard*. I did CR for 2-3 years, and you think about food a lot. If you're really serious about the diet, to the point where you're doing 25% restriction or so, you are almost always hungry. I eventually stopped practicing hardcore CR and started eating more freely, letting my weight get to around 135 (moderate CR). This doesn't have the phenomenal benefits that are seen with the rats on 33% CR, but the general healthiness is still there. But on the other hand, you aren't always thinking about food. After practicing extreme CR, I'm convinced that the amount of extra life you get is going to be less than or equal to the amount of time that you spend thinking about food.
Unless they come up with some kind of drug that allows a person to be 25% under their normal weight without feeling hungry, I doubt CR is ever going to be practical for humans. A couple extra decades just isn't going to be worth the suffering. Quality over quantity.
This shouldn't have been modded up so high. It didn't answer the question at all.
The original poster wasn't asking why we don't do away with paging, he was asking why does the paging have to be done on the hard drive.
High-end RAM, the kind you want sitting on the motherboard, is still expensive compared to yesterdays cheap PC100/PC133. But the older RAM is still *way* faster than the hard drive.
So what he was asking was: Why can't we figure out a way to use this old, cheap RAM for swap space instead of the hard drive. In other words, he wants stick a bunch of old PC100/PC133 modules together, and make it look like a swap partition to the OS.
He's not the only one either. A $50 PCI card, or an extra $30 tacked onto the cost of the motherboard would pay for itself many times over if you could load it up with a few GB of RAM on the cheap. For big applications, servers, or users who run many apps at once, you could get away with buying a lot less of the expensive RAM if the swap penalty wasn't so great.
Now, there *are* people making PCI cards that can be loaded up with RAM and treated as a disk by the OS, but they are not common, and last I checked they certainly weren't cheap. But that's probably just because there's not much demand and little competition.
Yes, Microsoft is free to give away their own software. That's not the point here. The point is, are the recipients allowed to *use* it?
For example, what happens when the BSA comes a-knockin' and finds this unlicensed copy of Visual Studio? Is the defense "MS gave it to me for free" going to work? And even if it does, how much time and money is it going to take to prove it?
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
This is not true. I use to get incapacitating pain in my forearms and shoulders from typing for hours at a time, day after day, but I really did find a solution. I wrote about this previously.
It really does work. I just finished over a week of constant coding, like from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, and only at the very end was I starting to feel anything at all. And it was just a slight pain when I reached for certain keys.
Keyboard remapping is important to. You never want to be reaching for the backspace or arrow keys. Eliminate as much wrist movement as possible, and that includes reaching for the mouse.
Strengthing the wrists with push-ups, as someone else recommended, might do some good, but taking all the stress off the arms in the first place is how you attack this problem at the root.
I often type for over 12 hours a day--not 12 hour workdays, but 12 hours of actually banging at the keyboard. I used to get really bad cramps in my forearms and shoulders that would totally incapacitate me for a day or two at a time. Because I'm too poor to afford any high-tech gadgets (split keyboards and such), I had to come up with a cheap solution.
What I did was to put a four books on the table and use one of those "natural" keyboards that have the keys at an angle. The four books are positioned in a way that the top two hang over the base of the keyboard, and nearly butt right up against the space bar. The books are angled so the base of my palms sits on the corners, and my wrists end up being perfectly level and aligned with my forearms. Also, the books are fairly thick, so my fingers kind of "hang down" onto the keys. These are large (long and wide) hardbacks, large enough so my elbows are also resting on them, and the net result is to take all of the strain off of my forearms and shoulders.
Since my shoulders no longer have to do any work to hold my arms in place, and my forearms no longer have to do any work to maneuver my wrists, all of the pain has disappeared. I've done several consecutive 16-hour days of coding without feeling much of anything at all, and have never even felt close to the point where I'm too sore to type.
I actually suspect that a lot of the so-called
"RSI" is not so much due to repition as it is due to the stress of holding ones arms and wrists in a certain position for hours at a time. If you've ever tried to hold a couple of heavy books with your arms perfectly straight for any length of time you'll know that the pain eventually becomes fiery and unbearable, and is quite similar to the pain you feel after several days of coding. By simply supporting your forearms and wrists with something other than your muscles, you do away with all of the strain, and in my case this was all that was needed.
The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?
Please prove this.
You say as much yourself just a few lines down. Whether the cost to the ISP by the NSP is fair or not is irrelevant; the fact remains that the cost to the ISP is proportional to the bandwidth used. Even if this were remedied, however, you still can't look at this as an unlimited resource like cable TV.
The bandwidth is not "consumed". After I send a packet, the same amount of bandwidth is still there.
For the duration of time that the packet is in transit, the bandwidth *is* consumed. If there were no concerns about the pipe being maxed out, it wouldn't matter, but the pipes do get maxed out, and these days it can happen pretty quickly too. If you treat bandwidth as an unlimited resource, and bill a flat rate with no caps, you quickly run into problems with the 5-10% who will saturate the pipe 24/7, rendering the service spotty or even useless for the other 90%. Then that other 90% eventually realizes that their 56k modem is faster, or your competition who *does* implement caps is faster and cheaper, and guess what: they leave. The "nice" 90% goes somewhere else, and you're stuck with a handful of greedy bastards.
It doesn't take a degree in economics to see why either bandwidth-caps or pay-per-use is essential to the survival of an ISP, NSP, or whatever. Until we have pipes so big that impossible to max them out (don't expect that anytime soon...), flat-rate unlimited usage just isn't going to work.
But hey, if you think you can make it work, why not start up an ISP and show us all how it's done;-) Guarantee you though, you'll be singing a different tune within a year.
Charging by the meg is stupid; it's not like they are paying to create the content on Yahoo or eBay or wherever.
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
It is not like cable TV. The cost to the cable providers does not increase based on the amount of TV you watch, and cable TV does not get unbearably sluggish if everyone in your city watches at the same time.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
This does happen. Ever heard of a toll road? If you drive on it every day, you pay every day. And it's fair. Why should I pay for a new highway from the city to the suburbs if I don't even drive to work? The toll goes to pay for the wear-and-tear you cause. And on a lot of toll roads, the bigger the vehicle, the more you pay.
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company...
What irony. The costs of running an ISP are much more comprable that of a water company than a cable TV company. The cost to a water provider is proportional to the amount of water you use, hence their pricing model. The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?
I am firmly against bandwidth caps, and here's why.
What are you replying to??? The original poster was also against bandwidth caps. The point is, pay-for-what-you-use is the only way this is going to be a long-term reality. Either (1) you have caps that limit how much everyone uses, (2) you don't have caps, but make people pay for what they use, or (3) the companies providing bandwidth go out of business.
Bandwidth is not free, and I know you know this. If there are no caps, and everyone pays a flat fee, just how do you prevent a tragedy of the commons?
Pay-per-use is the answer, just like electricty, water, or any other utility where the cost to the provider is proportional to the amount you use. Watching television is not the same thing at all. It does not cost the cable provider any more if you watch 2 hours or 20. But it does cost the ISPs more, and dammit you know this. You can't have it both ways. Either there is going to be pay-per-use or there are going to be bandwidth limitations. So which is it?
You do realize of course that MD5s only provide limited security. Afterall, if I can replace the.tar.gz, why can't I also replace the.md5?
See the reply to eht; this is an irrelevant point.
I'm not saying it's not a valid point, just irrelevant at this time. We're talking about a specific trojan here, and the fact remains that the checksum of an archive known not to contain this trojan has been published.
If you downloaded the archives from tcpdump.org at least two months, you are safe from this trojan because it had not been planted yet.
and exactly how hard would it be for whoever trojaned it to change the md5 sum?
In the current context, this is irrelevant. It is known that archive with md5sum 0597c23e3496a5c108097b2a0f1bd0c7 does not contain the trojan being discussed. So if the md5sum of the archive you downloaded checks out, you know you are not affected by this.
It's possible that other malicious code slipped in at an earlier date, and the person in that case did change the md5sum, but that's not something to lose sleep over until someone reveals it and you know it affects you.
Does that mean that this trojan has been around for almost a year before anybody noticed? If that's true, it does not meet my definition of "easily detected".
I downloaded libpcap/0.7.1 from tcpdump.org on September 2 of this year (just 2 months ago), and it was not trojaned (I keep a record of md5 sums, and was able to check this just now).
Probably whoever modified the file just touched it to resotre the original timestamp. This is trivial to do.
Grr. You sound just like the old folks from my hometown who vote down the school budget every year because they think their taxes are too high. In the meantime, the schools are falling apart, and the people most affected by them are kids who aren't taken seriously by the government/community.
And if the parents could vote against spending money on elderly programs, then what's the problem? Everybody gets to keep their own money, and spend it on the things important to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... someone gets a virus on my box, then convinces my ISP that I dowloaded a whole bunch of crap, then I get a huge bill, then I have to prove I didn't download?
Ummm... but you did download it. If someone runs an extension cord from one of your outside outlets to power their woodshop, you're going to get a big bill from the power company too. The argument "no I didn't, the guy next door did" just ain't gonna fly.
In the real world bandwidth costs money, just like electricity and water. If you don't take precautions against people leeching off your pipe, whose fault is that?
As for that potential urban legend, I have heard that twisted so many ways I don't know for sure anymore. You'd probably have to ask the guys directly, at this point. :)
It's not an urban legend. In "Weaving the Web", Tim Berners-Lee explicitly states
This isn't exactly new research. Studies on calorie restriction have been done for decades, and a real-world study was acidentally done in Biosphere II several years back when they couldn't produce as much food as they predicted. Dr. Roy Walford has written a popular book or two on the subject, and he sells a nutritional program called DWIDP to help with the diet. (I actually got my first real programming experience with Java back in 1998 writing my own CR software that used nutritional data from the USDA database, because DWIDP was pretty buggy.) There used to be a CR mailing list called cran@something-or-other for people who were actively doing it; for all I know it's still around.
The good: It really does have a significant impact on health. At my lowest weight I was down to around 115 pounds. At 5'8" with a medium build, this put me 25-30 pounds below "normal" weight. I was *really* thin back then--people would regularly comment on it, and sometimes it was a little difficult to convince people I wasn't anorexic. However, my health was *really* good. I got regular checkups, and ended up educating the doctor on CR because he was a bit surprised at how healthy I was. Blood pressure, resting heart rate, and cholesterol levels were extraordinary for someone who only rarely exercised.
The bad: It's *hard*. I did CR for 2-3 years, and you think about food a lot. If you're really serious about the diet, to the point where you're doing 25% restriction or so, you are almost always hungry. I eventually stopped practicing hardcore CR and started eating more freely, letting my weight get to around 135 (moderate CR). This doesn't have the phenomenal benefits that are seen with the rats on 33% CR, but the general healthiness is still there. But on the other hand, you aren't always thinking about food. After practicing extreme CR, I'm convinced that the amount of extra life you get is going to be less than or equal to the amount of time that you spend thinking about food.
Unless they come up with some kind of drug that allows a person to be 25% under their normal weight without feeling hungry, I doubt CR is ever going to be practical for humans. A couple extra decades just isn't going to be worth the suffering. Quality over quantity.
I hope I adequately answered your question :).
This shouldn't have been modded up so high. It didn't answer the question at all.
The original poster wasn't asking why we don't do away with paging, he was asking why does the paging have to be done on the hard drive.
High-end RAM, the kind you want sitting on the motherboard, is still expensive compared to yesterdays cheap PC100/PC133. But the older RAM is still *way* faster than the hard drive.
So what he was asking was: Why can't we figure out a way to use this old, cheap RAM for swap space instead of the hard drive. In other words, he wants stick a bunch of old PC100/PC133 modules together, and make it look like a swap partition to the OS.
He's not the only one either. A $50 PCI card, or an extra $30 tacked onto the cost of the motherboard would pay for itself many times over if you could load it up with a few GB of RAM on the cheap. For big applications, servers, or users who run many apps at once, you could get away with buying a lot less of the expensive RAM if the swap penalty wasn't so great.
Now, there *are* people making PCI cards that can be loaded up with RAM and treated as a disk by the OS, but they are not common, and last I checked they certainly weren't cheap. But that's probably just because there's not much demand and little competition.
1.1 mole
You DO know that without copyright law the GPL is unenforcable, right?
Time to read up on some history. Without copyright law, there would have never been any need for the GPL in the first place. Hit the books, kid.
Yes, Microsoft is free to give away their own software. That's not the point here. The point is, are the recipients allowed to *use* it?
For example, what happens when the BSA comes a-knockin' and finds this unlicensed copy of Visual Studio? Is the defense "MS gave it to me for free" going to work? And even if it does, how much time and money is it going to take to prove it?
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
This is not true. I use to get incapacitating pain in my forearms and shoulders from typing for hours at a time, day after day, but I really did find a solution. I wrote about this previously.
It really does work. I just finished over a week of constant coding, like from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, and only at the very end was I starting to feel anything at all. And it was just a slight pain when I reached for certain keys.
Keyboard remapping is important to. You never want to be reaching for the backspace or arrow keys. Eliminate as much wrist movement as possible, and that includes reaching for the mouse.
Strengthing the wrists with push-ups, as someone else recommended, might do some good, but taking all the stress off the arms in the first place is how you attack this problem at the root.
I often type for over 12 hours a day--not 12 hour workdays, but 12 hours of actually banging at the keyboard. I used to get really bad cramps in my forearms and shoulders that would totally incapacitate me for a day or two at a time. Because I'm too poor to afford any high-tech gadgets (split keyboards and such), I had to come up with a cheap solution.
What I did was to put a four books on the table and use one of those "natural" keyboards that have the keys at an angle. The four books are positioned in a way that the top two hang over the base of the keyboard, and nearly butt right up against the space bar. The books are angled so the base of my palms sits on the corners, and my wrists end up being perfectly level and aligned with my forearms. Also, the books are fairly thick, so my fingers kind of "hang down" onto the keys. These are large (long and wide) hardbacks, large enough so my elbows are also resting on them, and the net result is to take all of the strain off of my forearms and shoulders.
Since my shoulders no longer have to do any work to hold my arms in place, and my forearms no longer have to do any work to maneuver my wrists, all of the pain has disappeared. I've done several consecutive 16-hour days of coding without feeling much of anything at all, and have never even felt close to the point where I'm too sore to type.
I actually suspect that a lot of the so-called "RSI" is not so much due to repition as it is due to the stress of holding ones arms and wrists in a certain position for hours at a time. If you've ever tried to hold a couple of heavy books with your arms perfectly straight for any length of time you'll know that the pain eventually becomes fiery and unbearable, and is quite similar to the pain you feel after several days of coding. By simply supporting your forearms and wrists with something other than your muscles, you do away with all of the strain, and in my case this was all that was needed.
The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?
Please prove this.
You say as much yourself just a few lines down. Whether the cost to the ISP by the NSP is fair or not is irrelevant; the fact remains that the cost to the ISP is proportional to the bandwidth used. Even if this were remedied, however, you still can't look at this as an unlimited resource like cable TV.
The bandwidth is not "consumed". After I send a packet, the same amount of bandwidth is still there.
For the duration of time that the packet is in transit, the bandwidth *is* consumed. If there were no concerns about the pipe being maxed out, it wouldn't matter, but the pipes do get maxed out, and these days it can happen pretty quickly too. If you treat bandwidth as an unlimited resource, and bill a flat rate with no caps, you quickly run into problems with the 5-10% who will saturate the pipe 24/7, rendering the service spotty or even useless for the other 90%. Then that other 90% eventually realizes that their 56k modem is faster, or your competition who *does* implement caps is faster and cheaper, and guess what: they leave. The "nice" 90% goes somewhere else, and you're stuck with a handful of greedy bastards.
It doesn't take a degree in economics to see why either bandwidth-caps or pay-per-use is essential to the survival of an ISP, NSP, or whatever. Until we have pipes so big that impossible to max them out (don't expect that anytime soon...), flat-rate unlimited usage just isn't going to work.
But hey, if you think you can make it work, why not start up an ISP and show us all how it's done ;-) Guarantee you though, you'll be singing a different tune within a year.
Charging by the meg is stupid; it's not like they are paying to create the content on Yahoo or eBay or wherever.
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
It is not like cable TV. The cost to the cable providers does not increase based on the amount of TV you watch, and cable TV does not get unbearably sluggish if everyone in your city watches at the same time.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
This does happen. Ever heard of a toll road? If you drive on it every day, you pay every day. And it's fair. Why should I pay for a new highway from the city to the suburbs if I don't even drive to work? The toll goes to pay for the wear-and-tear you cause. And on a lot of toll roads, the bigger the vehicle, the more you pay.
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company...
What irony. The costs of running an ISP are much more comprable that of a water company than a cable TV company. The cost to a water provider is proportional to the amount of water you use, hence their pricing model. The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?
What are you replying to??? The original poster was also against bandwidth caps. The point is, pay-for-what-you-use is the only way this is going to be a long-term reality. Either (1) you have caps that limit how much everyone uses, (2) you don't have caps, but make people pay for what they use, or (3) the companies providing bandwidth go out of business.
Bandwidth is not free, and I know you know this. If there are no caps, and everyone pays a flat fee, just how do you prevent a tragedy of the commons?
Pay-per-use is the answer, just like electricty, water, or any other utility where the cost to the provider is proportional to the amount you use. Watching television is not the same thing at all. It does not cost the cable provider any more if you watch 2 hours or 20. But it does cost the ISPs more, and dammit you know this. You can't have it both ways. Either there is going to be pay-per-use or there are going to be bandwidth limitations. So which is it?
See the reply to eht; this is an irrelevant point.
I'm not saying it's not a valid point, just irrelevant at this time. We're talking about a specific trojan here, and the fact remains that the checksum of an archive known not to contain this trojan has been published.
If you downloaded the archives from tcpdump.org at least two months, you are safe from this trojan because it had not been planted yet.
m.In the current context, this is irrelevant. It is known that archive with md5sum 0597c23e3496a5c108097b2a0f1bd0c7 does not contain the trojan being discussed. So if the md5sum of the archive you downloaded checks out, you know you are not affected by this.
It's possible that other malicious code slipped in at an earlier date, and the person in that case did change the md5sum, but that's not something to lose sleep over until someone reveals it and you know it affects you.
I downloaded libpcap/0.7.1 from tcpdump.org on September 2 of this year (just 2 months ago), and it was not trojaned (I keep a record of md5 sums, and was able to check this just now).
Probably whoever modified the file just touched it to resotre the original timestamp. This is trivial to do.
And if the parents could vote against spending money on elderly programs, then what's the problem? Everybody gets to keep their own money, and spend it on the things important to them.