One alteration.
The problem with this, would be that everyone who owned a.com domain, that was changed to a.co.us, would immediately snap up.com back up.
Why? because all the links pointing to their site would be broken, and all their customers would know that URL.
ICANN should give people 3 months warning, change.com to.co.us, then wait at least 6 months before they put.com back on the market. They should put up a site telling people to update their links, and make all presently registered.coms point at that.
Then, companies who should be under.co.us would hopefully stay their, because by this time US comsumers would hopefully have got used to looking for companies under.co.us, rather than.com.
Half of my post was dedicated to relating a similar tale of a large IT company forcing customers to sign a NDA before recieving any help.
And this story was a perfect example of where open source pays off. If Windows was open sourced, an external developer could have gone through the code, and spotted a fault in the system that caused it to crash.
As a very minimum, he could have stopped wasting his own time trying to find out if his software was crashing the system. At best, he may well have written a fix for the bug, and posted it on the Internet, so other users could make their Windows boxes more reliable.
As Windows is a closed source product, for a long time M$ publicly denied that any such problem existed, and only would reveal this to developers under the cloak of NDAs.
Nevertheless, I would still submit that whatever you say, when the Sun engineers arrive at Ebay, the Ebay suits would cheerfully suck the engineers' dicks if they thought it would get the server back up a minute sooner.
Okay, I'm sorry, maybe there is no need to get offensive here, but my point is, would you, honestly, not sign that piece of paper?
This was a software company. The software was a piece of server software, so customers ought to be running it on NT, but they wanted to be able to say it would run on all M$ OSes, so they were testing it on all OSes they could lay their hands on ('95, NT, and some betas, I think - this was a few years back now).
I was not working for the company, so I cannot say any better than this. Ultimately, I think that the product remained in development for a long time, so I think it was released after '98 came out. I *think* the problem was fixed by then (not sure) so I don't think it was ever a problem in the real world, I was just describing M$'s behaviour.
Of course, this is all speculation until we see the patent, but here goes:
My assumption is, that the pantent covers the complicated procedure involved in exporting goods, so what it focuses on is completing all the customs paperwork for you. So:
Prior art: I think they would have to show that people were not doing international computer to computer transactions before the inventor came up with this invention.
There may not be any: if this covers a long and complicated process, this may well be the only, or the first, software that does this.
Obvious: If people are doing "domestic" computer transactions I can't see how anyone could successfully argue that "international" computer transactions are not a logical and obvious next step.
If the patentable idea is the fact it covers the customs procedure, then the part of the software patented may not exist in domestic software packages at all.
I would hope that the patent would fail in the courts for being far too damn obvious, but for a reason other than the one you give. They may be the first people to get a computer to carry out this process, however I would say that taking a commmon knowlegde process that a human being can complete, and simply implementing this in code, is a pretty obvious step.
If my guesswork is correct, I would expect the patent to be awarded, but hopefully be unenforceable.
'That sounds like a good deal, but I have a better one. I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call.'
Trouble is, you would get about the same reaction Neo did.
Think about it. There is nothing legally requiring Sun to deal with problems in the order that they are informed about them. There is nothing wrong with Sun implementing a high priority queue, of people who sign NDAs, and a low priority queue, of people who don't.
So you face a decision take the red pill, and you get your website back up and running. Take the blue pill, and Sun gets a bit of bad press, and you go bust.
If you are someone like Ebay, it really comes down to that. You are your website, and you must sell your soul to keep it up 24/7 (or the best you can).
Here's a little story:
I know of a UK company who had a problem with Win95. It crashed every 49.7 (I think) days. So they went to M$ UK. They were told it would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of £ for M$ to look into the problem. M$ knew the company had no clout, and could not afford this, so they decided to fuck them.
The company had some form of relationship to a larger US company, so they got them to take it to M$ in the US. This time, M$ insisted on the company signing a NDA. When they did so M$ admitted that this was a known flaw in '95. The clock didn't wrap nicely, so when you reach 2^32 milliseconds - 49.7 days (as I remember) Windows 95 (at least version A) crashes.
M$ has since admitted publicly.
People like micros~1 and Sun have reputations to keep, and a great deal of power. When you are dependant on them for your businesses survival, they can make you their bitches.
Chalk it down on the 'List of Good Reasons to Use Opensource'.
A couple of nice metaphors, but what was your point? [btw, I'm aware of the fact that you cannot legally enforce an illegal contract: another example, if I hire you to kill me, with a signed contract exonerating you, you are still guilty of murder. I cannot sign away my life in a contract.]
This thread has been about the rights of foreign nationals to register domains in the.com (and also.net/.org) TLD, and as I see it, this is really quite simple:
When you register a domain name you are entering into a legal, enforcable contract.
This contact gives ICANN/your registrar certain rights to revoke your domain name. Eg, domain names must be registered appropritely: so you must be a comercial entity to register a name in the.com TLD. However, there is no requirement that you must be based in the US to register a.com address, so they have no right to arbitrarily take.coms from non-US companies.
If you are not satisfied that the actions of ICANN/your registrar uphold the contract that you have with them, then you have recourse against them through the US courts.
If ICANN have treated you unfairly, the courts should restore the domain name to you. [and/or possible impose damages against ICANN for failing to uphold their part of the contract.]
IANAL
Short answer, a contract is only as enforceable as it is legal. If the contract is found to be illegal, it is null and void.
Are you suggesting that the contact entered into between domain name registers and their customers is not a legal, enforcable, contract? If so, why is it not legal? Otherwise, what the @%*& is your point?:-)
So a US judge can take away a domain that a Iranian(etc.) court says belongs to you.
True, but assuming that the US courts decide to uphold the law, there is such a thing as contract law.
When you 'buy' a domain name, you are not buying it in a property sense. However, you are binding ICANN/NSI, to a contract, to honor your domain name. The contacts allow for them to take the domain name away from you under certain circumstances. If you had a legal right to the domain name that you had registered, a US court should force ICANN/NSI to allow you to keep the name.
When I said 'False' in was refuting Meatloaf's claim that.com was a US specific TLD..com is not a US specific TLD, and therefore the defendant being a foreign national is not sufficient justification for ICANN to take away your domain. If ICANN take away a.com domain from an Iranian citizen, it should be because they would have taken the domain away from a US citizen, in the same circumstances.
I repect the US judicial system, and I would expect US courts to uphold contract law, and force ICANN to treat US and non-US citizens equally.
BTW. This judge made a brilliant decision. He ignored conventional 'wisdom', that domain names are property, and simply applied existing US law.
I'm not saying that domain names shouldn't be treated as property, but if you want that change made, it should be the leglislature, not the judiciary, who change the law. Talk top your congressman. When judges make up the law as they go along, you get the kind of situation in the DeCSS case where judge Kaplan made an 'unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law'[story], or the Napster case where the betamax precedent was totally ignored.
That is a United States top-level domain suffix, as decided by ICANN.
False
Check out the FAQ at Internic.net. To quote from it:
Are.com,.net, and.org domain names available for registration on a global basis?
Yes. The.com,.net, and.org domains are available for registration by Internet users across the globe.
The US has its own ccTLD (country code top level domain - shockingly this is.us), and anything else is international.
However, Harrison Ford would probably be able to take the domain for a different reason. They generally get you with the Uniform Domain Name
Dispute Resolution Policy, paragraph 4(a)(iii) (here). This is the bad faith clause, i.e. even if you are called Harrison Ford, few people who go to the site www.harrisonford.com are likely to be going there to see you. They would claim that you registered the domain name to either capture people who wanted to go to the site of the actor of the same name, or that you hoped to sting money out of him. They would say that one of these circumstances are more likely than you needing the name for yourself. [I'm trying to stay neutral - though in this circumstance I'd agree with them.]
Sorry, but when fsck did (Score:-1, Flamebait) become (Score:4, Insightful)?
Moderators: when the guy SHOUTS 'IRRELIVANT' he is doing it to piss people off. This is ill-informed flamebait.
A render farm *does* require these things of it's OS:
Reliability. if you spend half your time crashing, rebooting, and redoing work that has been lost, you need twice as much hardware, at twice the cost, to get the same amount of work done.
Low memory footprint. Rendering is very memory intensive. The less space that is wasted by the OS, the faster you go.
Runs on the hardware that you have decided it approprite to your requirements.
A nice, friendly, productive operating environment. Remember, many of these animators will be happiest telling the render machines what to do in a UNIX environment, coming from an IRIX background.
An OS that keeps out of your way. Eg how much time does your OS spend sitting in the scheduler?
Sorry if I get a bit flamey, but this post is just *SO* overrated.
It's not easy being a massive corparation, which wants to control not only the content that people receive, the means of distibution, and also maintain a monopoly over the hardware they recieve it on.
The brainwaves of children playing the games are monitored and used to calibrate the performance of the joystick or gamepad being used to play the game.
When the children produce the right sort of brainwaves the joystick becomes more responsive reinforcing the behaviour.
Bzzzzzzzzztttttt!
That's right, electo-shock therapy to cure people of being crap at sonic the hedgehog:-)
I like it.
In America, increasing numbers of children are being treated for ADD and many doctors are prescribing drugs such as Ritalin to calm them down and help them expand their attention span.
Earlier this year the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board found that, in some American schools, up to 40% of children in a class were being given Ritalin.
Yeah, seriously - without starting a flamewar - anything has got to be better than just putting kids on dope. (I'm not condemming parents who use Ritalin - I'm just saying, developing new treatments is a good thing). Makes the war on drugs seem a bit silly.
[I enjoy a good arguement. If you are not enjoying this discussion, please stop reading now:-)]
The plural of "anecdotal evidence" is not "data."
True, but it is now you who is doing the pedant-stylie hoop jumping.
What does an OS have to do to be compliant with the POSIX spec.? It has to support a variety of functions, e.g. fork, and implement them correctly. How many times do you think that the fork instruction has successfully executed on Linux boxes around the world, in the time you have been reading this post? Are you actually suggesting that the fork instruction is not correctly implemented, or are you just playing word games?
There are two ways that you can really test code. Check it in theory, by independant code review, and check it in practice, by running test data through it. I would suggest that:
The core of the Linux kernel is constantly under a far higher level of scrutiny than I'm sure would be necesary to complete the POSIX certification process. Many eyes make bugs shallow. And opensource software has a lot of advocates in academia - very intellegent and experienced computer scientists.
No testing process can test every every possible combination of variables. Linux is being put through its paces live on a hell of a lot of machines around the world, and is passing the test. Data? No. But a lot of anecdotal evidence.
Anyway, although it carries less wieght, "anecdotal evidence" is a form of data. I [personally] have no firm evidence at all that there is such a thing as gravity. I haven't performed any tests. I only have anecdotal evidence that I cannot fly. But I have a hell of a lot of evidence - experience from every day of my life. This is not proof, but then nothing can ever be proven, only disproven. It is firm enough for me to choose not to jump off tall buildings.
I believe in gravity until someone demonstrates otherwise, and I believe that Linux is POSIX compliant until someone demonstrates otherwise.
Okay, consider this a discussion document and feel free to tell me I'm wrong:-)
Two main case studies spring to mind of people Freeing up previously comercial products.
Netscape Navigator
Motivation:
Crisis. Hands were forced (by micros~1 giving away IE) to make it free, so may as well make it Free. Hoping for free labour?
What went wrong:
The product was a mess - It needed a complete rewrite. It was less like a commercial product being opensourced, more like the start of a new opensource project. Mozilla was not a product in use by people, so people didn't have an itch to scratch in the code. Most geeks were quite happy with how Navigator performed, anyway.
How did they correct this:
Simple. Hard work. They have re-written the browser with little external support (although, respect to those who did help them).
Sucess?
Yes. { I guess this one will be a little contraversial } Given AOL's position (their dependance on Microsoft), buying out Netscape was always going to be a smart move. This would probably have happened whatever. The lack of support means that
opensourcing Naviagator probably wouldn't have helped save the company. Once the browser was opensource, the opensource community would probably not have let it die - but AOL couldn't rely on that fact.
But the future looks promising. It will probably become the standard browser every where but Windows & MacOS, and may well make inroads there. And in this I am including a big embedded (eg WebTV) market. Once There is an actual code base out there, and people are using the software, people are more likely to contribute.
$$$$$
I don't need to say where AOL gets it's money:-)
StarOffice
Motivation:
Make money out of support.
Win friends in the opensource community, while at the same time withdrawing from submitting Java to standards processes:-(
Get an office on Solaris as strong as M$ Office.
Piss Bill Gates off.
What went wrong:
It was free, but it wasn't Free. Corparations are finding out that the opensource community are not just a bunch of freeloaders who do not want to play for their software, but that
freedom actually means something to us. Sun released the source - the opensource community turned up their noses, said "no, that isn't Free", and carried on developing the office suites for KDE & Gnome.
How did they correct this:
Three letters: GPL.
Sucess?
Not yet.
But As Sun accept Gnome as the next window manager for Solaris, any help for Gnome Office is support for Sun workstations. UNIX, not just Linux, will probably end up with a strong office suite out of this, and that helps Sun make money out of hardware.
$$$$$
Not yet.
I'm sure that Sun would like to make money out of support, but like I say, they really make their money elsewhere.
POSIX compliant means it's been certified as such. That means that people have to audit the code and suchlike.
You get your code audited, you get a pretty certificate to hang on the wall, your code is certified POSIX compliant. The code does not change. It's not like, before the audit it wasn't compliant to the POSIX specification, but after the audit it is. The code does not change. Either yout code is compliant to a set specification or it isn't. All the auditing in the world won't change this.
I'm sorry if I sound a little flamey, but what the hell.
Linux has not been put through the standard set of POSIX compliance tests, but the set of functions that are required by POSIX are put to test by millions of machines every day.
Wrong. Linux has aimed to be POSIX compliant. It's close enough that most people won't notice, but until someone has poured over it, you can't be sure.
You boldly state that I am wrong, but you do not go on to back this statement up.
Compliance to a specification is like a scientific hypothesis: you cannot prove it true, you can only prove it false, by finding an example where it fails.
Going through the rigourous POSIX compliance tests is like testing a scientific hypothesis, and you can understand why many scientists would choose to not accept a theory as being valid until is has been scientificly tested.
But the mere fact that a scientific hypothesis has not yet been tested does not mean that the hypothesis is not in fact correct. And just because Linux has not been tested to ensure that it implements the POSIX spec. correctly, does not mean that it does not actually do so.
(POSIX compliant) != (certified POSIX compliant)
It is possible that there is a fault in Sun's implementation of POSIX in Solaris. Testing cannot possibly hope to check every possible combination of variables. It is possible that the Linux implementation is absolutely perfect. Having Linux tested would be nice, but is pretty impractical for an OS growing and changing so quickly.
Linux has not been put through the standard set of POSIX compliance tests, but the set of functions that are required by POSIX are put to test by millions of machines every day. I have not heard of there being any known faults in Linux's POSIX compliance. If you know of any faults in Linux state them. Otherwise, you do not flatly state that Linux is not POSIX compliant, as you do not have any evidence to back this statement up.
So I found myself coming back to some topics again and again in different contexts because they were such touchstones for the movement. This will probably be a bit more grating for those who regularily read Slashdot because many of the ideas are already familiar.
True, but don't be too hard on yourself:-) For a slashdot reader like myself, the style may feel a little weird, but certainly not enough to justify words like 'grating' entering the conversation.
You're not like a two year old kid watching TeleSlashies, you're already in post graduate school.
Bah! no dissing the teletubbies!
But I hope that the extra fill in and repetition makes the book more accessable to everyone else.
One of the reasons that I bought this book, was that I find it interesting to follow how much intellegent, well informed non-geeks can understand about computing issues, and to see what information is avaivable to them. It is useful to get a bit of perspective every now and then. Eg, another book I have read recently is "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. "Buy this book, read it, then give it to your boss" wouldn't be a bad plan for a lot of people.
Like I said in my original post - I'm enjoying reading this book. I would say that the style of this book works well - it is the kind of book that can chat in an informed manner about kernels, but still be accessible to people who don't know what a modem is.
Excelent book,
many thanks, G
ps. MODERATORS: look at the parent to this post. When the author of the book that is being reviewed posts a comment, that is (Score 5, Interesting). Put down the crack pipes and moderate accordingly.
Still, Torvalds had high ambitions. He was writing a toy, but he wanted it to have many, if not all, of the features found in full-strength UNIX versions on the market. On July 3, he started wondering how to acomplish this and placed a posting on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix, writing:
Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.
Linux has been POSIX compliant since it was a hack project in Minix. But compliant and Has-Paid-Us-Lots-Of-Fees-And-Is-Certified compliant are two very different things.
Slashdot Mirror
Great suggestion:
.com domain, that was changed to a .co.us, would immediately snap up .com back up.
.com to .co.us, then wait at least 6 months before they put .com back on the market. They should put up a site telling people to update their links, and make all presently registered .coms point at that.
.co.us would hopefully stay their, because by this time US comsumers would hopefully have got used to looking for companies under .co.us, rather than .com.
One alteration.
The problem with this, would be that everyone who owned a
Why? because all the links pointing to their site would be broken, and all their customers would know that URL.
ICANN should give people 3 months warning, change
Then, companies who should be under
G
Fair point, troll, but only for the Sun example.
Half of my post was dedicated to relating a similar tale of a large IT company forcing customers to sign a NDA before recieving any help.
And this story was a perfect example of where open source pays off. If Windows was open sourced, an external developer could have gone through the code, and spotted a fault in the system that caused it to crash.
As a very minimum, he could have stopped wasting his own time trying to find out if his software was crashing the system. At best, he may well have written a fix for the bug, and posted it on the Internet, so other users could make their Windows boxes more reliable.
As Windows is a closed source product, for a long time M$ publicly denied that any such problem existed, and only would reveal this to developers under the cloak of NDAs.
G
Yeah, point taken, and good information.
Nevertheless, I would still submit that whatever you say, when the Sun engineers arrive at Ebay, the Ebay suits would cheerfully suck the engineers' dicks if they thought it would get the server back up a minute sooner.
Okay, I'm sorry, maybe there is no need to get offensive here, but my point is, would you, honestly, not sign that piece of paper?
G
Fair point, but there was a reason for '95:
This was a software company. The software was a piece of server software, so customers ought to be running it on NT, but they wanted to be able to say it would run on all M$ OSes, so they were testing it on all OSes they could lay their hands on ('95, NT, and some betas, I think - this was a few years back now).
I was not working for the company, so I cannot say any better than this. Ultimately, I think that the product remained in development for a long time, so I think it was released after '98 came out. I *think* the problem was fixed by then (not sure) so I don't think it was ever a problem in the real world, I was just describing M$'s behaviour.
G
Yes, but if everyone takes the red pill, they never have to piss anyone off, so they get to keep all their customers happy.
If you are a manager, and the choice is take the NDA, and get good service, or risk going bust - there is no decision to make here.
Let someone else make a stand: principles are nice, working webservers/databases are much, much nicer when your business is on the line.
So long as everyone plays nicely for Sun, they get all their customers to sign NDAs, and their customers all get good service.
G
My assumption is, that the pantent covers the complicated procedure involved in exporting goods, so what it focuses on is completing all the customs paperwork for you. So:
-
Prior art: I think they would have to show that people were not doing international computer to computer transactions before the inventor came up with this invention.
There may not be any: if this covers a long and complicated process, this may well be the only, or the first, software that does this.-
Obvious: If people are doing "domestic" computer transactions I can't see how anyone could successfully argue that "international" computer transactions are not a logical and obvious next step.
If the patentable idea is the fact it covers the customs procedure, then the part of the software patented may not exist in domestic software packages at all.I would hope that the patent would fail in the courts for being far too damn obvious, but for a reason other than the one you give. They may be the first people to get a computer to carry out this process, however I would say that taking a commmon knowlegde process that a human being can complete, and simply implementing this in code, is a pretty obvious step.
If my guesswork is correct, I would expect the patent to be awarded, but hopefully be unenforceable.
G
-
'That sounds like a good deal, but I have a better one. I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call.'
Trouble is, you would get about the same reaction Neo did.Think about it. There is nothing legally requiring Sun to deal with problems in the order that they are informed about them. There is nothing wrong with Sun implementing a high priority queue, of people who sign NDAs, and a low priority queue, of people who don't.
So you face a decision take the red pill, and you get your website back up and running. Take the blue pill, and Sun gets a bit of bad press, and you go bust.
If you are someone like Ebay, it really comes down to that. You are your website, and you must sell your soul to keep it up 24/7 (or the best you can).
Here's a little story:
I know of a UK company who had a problem with Win95. It crashed every 49.7 (I think) days. So they went to M$ UK. They were told it would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of £ for M$ to look into the problem. M$ knew the company had no clout, and could not afford this, so they decided to fuck them.
The company had some form of relationship to a larger US company, so they got them to take it to M$ in the US. This time, M$ insisted on the company signing a NDA. When they did so M$ admitted that this was a known flaw in '95. The clock didn't wrap nicely, so when you reach 2^32 milliseconds - 49.7 days (as I remember) Windows 95 (at least version A) crashes.
M$ has since admitted publicly.
People like micros~1 and Sun have reputations to keep, and a great deal of power. When you are dependant on them for your businesses survival, they can make you their bitches.
Chalk it down on the 'List of Good Reasons to Use Opensource'.
G
A couple of nice metaphors, but what was your point? [btw, I'm aware of the fact that you cannot legally enforce an illegal contract: another example, if I hire you to kill me, with a signed contract exonerating you, you are still guilty of murder. I cannot sign away my life in a contract.]
This thread has been about the rights of foreign nationals to register domains in the .com (and also .net/.org) TLD, and as I see it, this is really quite simple:
-
When you register a domain name you are entering into a legal, enforcable contract.
-
This contact gives ICANN/your registrar certain rights to revoke your domain name. Eg, domain names must be registered appropritely: so you must be a comercial entity to register a name in the
.com TLD. However, there is no requirement that you must be based in the US to register a .com address, so they have no right to arbitrarily take .coms from non-US companies.
-
If you are not satisfied that the actions of ICANN/your registrar uphold the contract that you have with them, then you have recourse against them through the US courts.
-
If ICANN have treated you unfairly, the courts should restore the domain name to you. [and/or possible impose damages against ICANN for failing to uphold their part of the contract.]
IANAL-
Short answer, a contract is only as enforceable as it is legal. If the contract is found to be illegal, it is null and void.
Are you suggesting that the contact entered into between domain name registers and their customers is not a legal, enforcable, contract? If so, why is it not legal? Otherwise, what the @%*& is your point?G
-
So a US judge can take away a domain that a Iranian(etc.) court says belongs to you.
True, but assuming that the US courts decide to uphold the law, there is such a thing as contract law.When you 'buy' a domain name, you are not buying it in a property sense. However, you are binding ICANN/NSI, to a contract, to honor your domain name. The contacts allow for them to take the domain name away from you under certain circumstances. If you had a legal right to the domain name that you had registered, a US court should force ICANN/NSI to allow you to keep the name.
When I said 'False' in was refuting Meatloaf's claim that .com was a US specific TLD. .com is not a US specific TLD, and therefore the defendant being a foreign national is not sufficient justification for ICANN to take away your domain. If ICANN take away a .com domain from an Iranian citizen, it should be because they would have taken the domain away from a US citizen, in the same circumstances.
I repect the US judicial system, and I would expect US courts to uphold contract law, and force ICANN to treat US and non-US citizens equally.
BTW. This judge made a brilliant decision. He ignored conventional 'wisdom', that domain names are property, and simply applied existing US law.
I'm not saying that domain names shouldn't be treated as property, but if you want that change made, it should be the leglislature, not the judiciary, who change the law. Talk top your congressman. When judges make up the law as they go along, you get the kind of situation in the DeCSS case where judge Kaplan made an 'unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law'[story], or the Napster case where the betamax precedent was totally ignored.
Well done, judge.
-
That is a United States top-level domain suffix, as decided by ICANN.
FalseCheck out the FAQ at Internic.net. To quote from it:
- Are
.com, .net, and .org domain names available for registration on a global basis?
The US has its own ccTLD (country code top level domain - shockingly this isYes. The .com, .net, and .org domains are available for registration by Internet users across the globe.
However, Harrison Ford would probably be able to take the domain for a different reason. They generally get you with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, paragraph 4(a)(iii) (here). This is the bad faith clause, i.e. even if you are called Harrison Ford, few people who go to the site www.harrisonford.com are likely to be going there to see you. They would claim that you registered the domain name to either capture people who wanted to go to the site of the actor of the same name, or that you hoped to sting money out of him. They would say that one of these circumstances are more likely than you needing the name for yourself. [I'm trying to stay neutral - though in this circumstance I'd agree with them.]
cheers,
G
Fair comment, but [while I don't go shopping for this type of equipment myself] the prices on those SGI 1200's looked a steal to me.
:-)
Buy something at half the price - buy twice as many - more than make up for the speed loss. I think that Titanic was rendered on x86's. Go figure.
Moderators: when the guy SHOUTS 'IRRELIVANT' he is doing it to piss people off. This is ill-informed flamebait.
A render farm *does* require these things of it's OS:
-
Reliability. if you spend half your time crashing, rebooting, and redoing work that has been lost, you need twice as much hardware, at twice the cost, to get the same amount of work done.
-
Low memory footprint. Rendering is very memory intensive. The less space that is wasted by the OS, the faster you go.
-
Runs on the hardware that you have decided it approprite to your requirements.
-
A nice, friendly, productive operating environment. Remember, many of these animators will be happiest telling the render machines what to do in a UNIX environment, coming from an IRIX background.
-
An OS that keeps out of your way. Eg how much time does your OS spend sitting in the scheduler?
Sorry if I get a bit flamey, but this post is just *SO* overrated.Rendering also needs oodles of memory.
:-)
The 1meg limit could be a bit of a problem
Nope.
They tried to trademark "Open Source" so they could ensure it was only used when approprite, but they couldn't - it was already in too widespread use.
:-(
Hey, leave Sony alone.
It's not easy being a massive corparation, which wants to control not only the content that people receive, the means of distibution, and also maintain a monopoly over the hardware they recieve it on.
Give 'em a break, eh?
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pretty blisteringly fast. So, here's a thought: They're watching everything closely.
Maybe they are not watching everything closely.Maybe they just watching Slashdot closely.
Where else does a lazy journalist keep up to date with the latest IT news?
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The brainwaves of children playing the games are monitored and used to calibrate the performance of the joystick or gamepad being used to play the game.
Bzzzzzzzzztttttt!When the children produce the right sort of brainwaves the joystick becomes more responsive reinforcing the behaviour.
That's right, electo-shock therapy to cure people of being crap at sonic the hedgehog :-)
I like it.
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In America, increasing numbers of children are being treated for ADD and many doctors are prescribing drugs such as Ritalin to calm them down and help them expand their attention span.
Yeah, seriously - without starting a flamewar - anything has got to be better than just putting kids on dope. (I'm not condemming parents who use Ritalin - I'm just saying, developing new treatments is a good thing).Earlier this year the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board found that, in some American schools, up to 40% of children in a class were being given Ritalin.
Makes the war on drugs seem a bit silly.
G
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The plural of "anecdotal evidence" is not "data."
True, but it is now you who is doing the pedant-stylie hoop jumping.What does an OS have to do to be compliant with the POSIX spec.? It has to support a variety of functions, e.g. fork, and implement them correctly. How many times do you think that the fork instruction has successfully executed on Linux boxes around the world, in the time you have been reading this post? Are you actually suggesting that the fork instruction is not correctly implemented, or are you just playing word games?
There are two ways that you can really test code. Check it in theory, by independant code review, and check it in practice, by running test data through it. I would suggest that:
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The core of the Linux kernel is constantly under a far higher level of scrutiny than I'm sure would be necesary to complete the POSIX certification process. Many eyes make bugs shallow. And opensource software has a lot of advocates in academia - very intellegent and experienced computer scientists.
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No testing process can test every every possible combination of variables. Linux is being put through its paces live on a hell of a lot of machines around the world, and is passing the test. Data? No. But a lot of anecdotal evidence.
Anyway, although it carries less wieght, "anecdotal evidence" is a form of data. I [personally] have no firm evidence at all that there is such a thing as gravity. I haven't performed any tests. I only have anecdotal evidence that I cannot fly. But I have a hell of a lot of evidence - experience from every day of my life. This is not proof, but then nothing can ever be proven, only disproven. It is firm enough for me to choose not to jump off tall buildings.I believe in gravity until someone demonstrates otherwise, and I believe that Linux is POSIX compliant until someone demonstrates otherwise.
Smile,
G
Two main case studies spring to mind of people Freeing up previously comercial products.
Netscape Navigator
- Motivation:
- I don't need to say where AOL gets it's money
:-)
StarOffice- Crisis. Hands were forced (by micros~1 giving away IE) to make it free, so may as well make it Free. Hoping for free labour?
What went wrong:- The product was a mess - It needed a complete rewrite. It was less like a commercial product being opensourced, more like the start of a new opensource project. Mozilla was not a product in use by people, so people didn't have an itch to scratch in the code. Most geeks were quite happy with how Navigator performed, anyway.
How did they correct this:- Simple. Hard work. They have re-written the browser with little external support (although, respect to those who did help them).
Sucess?- Yes. { I guess this one will be a little contraversial } Given AOL's position (their dependance on Microsoft), buying out Netscape was always going to be a smart move. This would probably have happened whatever. The lack of support means that
- opensourcing Naviagator probably wouldn't have helped save the company. Once the browser was opensource, the opensource community would probably not have let it die - but AOL couldn't rely on that fact.
$$$$$But the future looks promising. It will probably become the standard browser every where but Windows & MacOS, and may well make inroads there. And in this I am including a big embedded (eg WebTV) market. Once There is an actual code base out there, and people are using the software, people are more likely to contribute.
- Motivation:
- Not yet.
Good luck- Make money out of support.
- Win friends in the opensource community, while at the same time withdrawing from submitting Java to standards processes
:-(
- Get an office on Solaris as strong as M$ Office.
- Piss Bill Gates off.
What went wrong:- It was free, but it wasn't Free. Corparations are finding out that the opensource community are not just a bunch of freeloaders who do not want to play for their software, but that
- freedom actually means something to us. Sun released the source - the opensource community turned up their noses, said "no, that isn't Free", and carried on developing the office suites for KDE & Gnome.
How did they correct this:- Three letters: GPL.
Sucess?- Not yet.
$$$$$But As Sun accept Gnome as the next window manager for Solaris, any help for Gnome Office is support for Sun workstations. UNIX, not just Linux, will probably end up with a strong office suite out of this, and that helps Sun make money out of hardware.
I'm sure that Sun would like to make money out of support, but like I say, they really make their money elsewhere.
G
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POSIX compliant means it's been certified as such. That means that people have to audit the code and suchlike.
You get your code audited, you get a pretty certificate to hang on the wall, your code is certified POSIX compliant. The code does not change. It's not like, before the audit it wasn't compliant to the POSIX specification, but after the audit it is. The code does not change. Either yout code is compliant to a set specification or it isn't. All the auditing in the world won't change this.I'm sorry if I sound a little flamey, but what the hell.
G
Linux has not been put through the standard set of POSIX compliance tests, but the set of functions that are required by POSIX are put to test by millions of machines every day.
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Wrong. Linux has aimed to be POSIX compliant. It's close enough that most people won't notice, but until someone has poured over it, you can't be sure.
You boldly state that I am wrong, but you do not go on to back this statement up.Compliance to a specification is like a scientific hypothesis: you cannot prove it true, you can only prove it false, by finding an example where it fails.
Going through the rigourous POSIX compliance tests is like testing a scientific hypothesis, and you can understand why many scientists would choose to not accept a theory as being valid until is has been scientificly tested.
But the mere fact that a scientific hypothesis has not yet been tested does not mean that the hypothesis is not in fact correct. And just because Linux has not been tested to ensure that it implements the POSIX spec. correctly, does not mean that it does not actually do so.
(POSIX compliant) != (certified POSIX compliant)
It is possible that there is a fault in Sun's implementation of POSIX in Solaris. Testing cannot possibly hope to check every possible combination of variables. It is possible that the Linux implementation is absolutely perfect. Having Linux tested would be nice, but is pretty impractical for an OS growing and changing so quickly.
Linux has not been put through the standard set of POSIX compliance tests, but the set of functions that are required by POSIX are put to test by millions of machines every day. I have not heard of there being any known faults in Linux's POSIX compliance. If you know of any faults in Linux state them. Otherwise, you do not flatly state that Linux is not POSIX compliant, as you do not have any evidence to back this statement up.
G
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So I found myself coming back to some topics again and again in different contexts because they were such touchstones for the movement. This will probably be a bit more grating for those who regularily read Slashdot because many of the ideas are already familiar.
True, but don't be too hard on yourself- You're not like a two year old kid watching TeleSlashies, you're already in post graduate school.
Bah! no dissing the teletubbies!- But I hope that the extra fill in and repetition makes the book more accessable to everyone else.
One of the reasons that I bought this book, was that I find it interesting to follow how much intellegent, well informed non-geeks can understand about computing issues, and to see what information is avaivable to them. It is useful to get a bit of perspective every now and then. Eg, another book I have read recently is "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. "Buy this book, read it, then give it to your boss" wouldn't be a bad plan for a lot of people.Like I said in my original post - I'm enjoying reading this book. I would say that the style of this book works well - it is the kind of book that can chat in an informed manner about kernels, but still be accessible to people who don't know what a modem is.
Excelent book,
many thanks,
G
ps.
MODERATORS: look at the parent to this post. When the author of the book that is being reviewed posts a comment, that is (Score 5, Interesting). Put down the crack pipes and moderate accordingly.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense in this thread.
Sorry.
G
- Still, Torvalds had high ambitions. He was writing a toy, but he wanted it to have many, if not all, of the features found in full-strength UNIX versions on the market. On July 3, he started wondering how to acomplish this and placed a posting on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.minix, writing:
- Hello netlanders,
Linux has been POSIX compliant since it was a hack project in Minix. But compliant and Has-Paid-Us-Lots-Of-Fees-And-Is-Certified compliant are two very different things.Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.
G