Look for an LTO gen 1 or SDLT220/320 on ebay, with a SCSI connection (some of them are fibre, and I assume you don't want to go there!). Don't forget to pick up some tapes. In general, this sounds like it would work if you plan on doing this for a while, and can leverage the initial investment over months or years.
Capacities are (for the cost of a sub $50 tape): - LTO1: 100 GB uncompressed - LTO2: 200 GB uncompressed - SDLT220: 110 GB uncompressed - SDLT320: 160 GB uncompressed
If your data is particularly ammenable to compression (i.e. database data) you could easily get 3 or 4 to 1 compression with these drives without sinking your CPU utilization.
I wonder whether future versions will offer predictive capabilities? Imgine being told you are going to have a heart attack in 15 minutes? Now add wireless, and imagine have an ambulance show up, ask you to get in, and take you to the hospital just in time for your impending cardiac arrest. Gee wireless, just in time supply chain, predictive diagnostics, with that many buzzwords, its gonna be a hit for sure!
Well, both are true depending on your perspective. For many true fans of SC, the former is more true than the later. Most die hard SC fans will argue that SC is deeper strategically, tactically, doesnt pander to newbies the way WC does, doesnt incorporate dumb 3d elements (which make it harder to play), doesnt automate (autocast) everything, doesnt include luck the way WC3 does (and a real RTS shouldnt), etc.
For most people that didnt spend hundreds of hours with SC, WC3 is pretty damn good. Its learning curve is no where near as steep, it has gorgeous graphics, four races instead of three (which must be better!), and breaks new ground by combining RTS and RPG.
It really is a matter of perspective, and that is all that I was getting at by labelling it both. I am definitely in the former camp, and could spend whole pages of text arguing my point, but that is senseless. And I hope I have enough perspective to know that not everybody will agree with me, and will have their own good reasons for believing what they will.
But, like it or not, SC is a seminal game, and WC3 is enormously important as it will sell millions, and by copied and imitated for years to come.
It doesnt matter if you vilify them (for turning out an execrable piece of garbage like WC3) or laud them for turning out great games (like WC3 or Diablo) they have had a profound influence on the direction of computer gaming in the last 5 years. It is difficult to think of two games that have been more influential, and more copied in their respective genres: SC/WC for real time strategy (RTS) and Diablo for "role-playing".
Although it is tough to separate their individual contributions from those of Blizzard as a whole, they have inarguably produced highly influential games. Significantly, those games have also sold enormous volumes (basically equal in numbers to the Lara Croft series and the GTA series... i.e. several millions of copies of each release).
What is means is that the value of Blizzard just dropped a bit, although perhaps not as much as some are suggesting... a lot of their value resides in their name, their "goodwill" as it is called. And for the masses, who will never even hear of this, the name Blizzard will continue to by synonomous with outstanding games that are probably the least buggy/best supported in the industry (that is sure to get me flamed or modded down!).
It might also mean that some interesting games are in the future assuming you dont buy the theory that Bill ruined WC3. At very least, their departure is a big loss for Blizzard (again, WC3 aside) and a big gain for themselves or some other studio.
No way is correct. The first watch described in the article has bluetooth support for headsets. So I would imagine your watch could be in your backpack, around your belt, or whatever other oddball location should strike your fancy and it would not impair your ability to make calls.
Who knows, with bluetooth being what it is, but it is entirely possible that you could dial from your PDA, and use it as an access point for your PDA when you are not in a hotspot.
Which is actually pretty common, in the sense that it is one of a class of solutions designed to deal with that aspect of backup and recovery. Lets face it, not a lot of production systems for big business can afford to be down for the time that it takes to back up the database.
The "third mirror" type of solution is one approach: use the disk hardware itself to make a copy or copies, sometimes virtual or logical only, sometimes physical. Then backup the copy, not the original.
Then there is another class that uses software (host based) to do exactly the same thing: create a logical or physical copy of the data, split it off, back it up, then resynch it. (There are exceptions, so unless you have a specific product in mind, don't hold me to exact process; different specific products have slightly different implementations).
Finally, there is software that can intervene and permit backups even while the application or database is online.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses. None is cheap! And offhand, I would guess that I listed them in order of acceptance by companies (but that is just a guess based on the annecdotal evidence of "what I see in the marketplace").
I can think of two good reasons... OK, well two reasons, you can make up your own mind if they are good or not! Reason one is that tapes, especially tapes handled by humans that get dropped, are not 100% reliable. So there is some advantage to having two copies on tape. The other is centered on disaster recovery: what happens if it is the offsite storage facility that gets irreparably damanged (but not your data centre)? Redundancy is central to disaster recovery.
Anyways, I can see both sides of the issue, and I do appreciate how expensive tape is. But my experience, working with a bunch of different companies on the issue of backp is different: those that could afford two copies did.
The thing that strikes me is the truth or not of that statement really depends on the magnitude of the problem. If we are talking about 1 or 2 TB of data that needs backing up, that is partially true (but a LTO2 drive and 10 200 GB uncompressed tapes is less than 10k).
However, for really large sites that host 25 TB or more, and need to back a good chunk of that up every night (databases) tape is still really the only way to go. A library system capable of holding 100 TB is slightly less than $250k (thats eight LTO2 tape drives and a whole bunch of space to store cartridges). You then need to add in a bunch of money for tapes, and software, and admin. That might double the cost of an annual basis. But only for the first year; after that, you start to get some return on your initial investment.
However, the solution you get meets the #1 rule of backup: anything worth backing up is worth backing up offsite. And this does not mean make a backup, and take it offsite. This means make a backup, and make a second copy and take *that* offsite. Anything else is just not worth doing.
The notion of using disk has a couple other drawbacks: you would pretty much have to compress databases on the client side (and it is not clear to me that has a very good impact on CPU activity levels!) because normally you would trust the very good compression algorithms of the tape drives to do this; and, you would have to have a pretty robust/commercial level database for tracking changes in client data for backup. Also, it seems pretty clear that the environmentals (power, cooling) would cost a lot more using disk rather than tape.
Dont get me wrong, it is a really good idea, whose time may yet come. But without second site copies, it is really not appropriate for use in any major enterprise (i.e. with shareholder and auditor scrutiny!). However, combine the thought with cheap IP data replication to a second array, and you just might have something...
God is dead. (Neitzche)
Tape is dead. (Innumerable pundits)
Disk is dead. (Conquest FS)
Yet somehow, they all seem to be alive and kicking as of right now. I wouldnt be throwing a wake just yet for any of 'em.
The local IBM office has several hundred employees using cisco VOIP phones. It also works fine. There is a big difference between a few ms of latency, and something that is detectable to you or I.
Well, for a lot less money I can get a device that runs Pocket PC 2002, does handwriting recognition just as well as this device (and with all of the functionality you mention above) and is not tied to a desktop somewhere (via 802.11b) to provide the functionality.
Having used such a device in the real world for a few months now, I have to admit that I love it for its multifunctionality (mp3 player, book, game machine, and as much of a notepad as I ever need for meetings, and all the wireless I need with 802.11b)... but all this can be had for way less than the device reviewed. And the battery lasts just as long. And it weighs.15 of the tablet.
So I fail to see why I would want a tablet. Not only is it not an innovation (CE has the functionality, and took it directly from Newton code IIRC) it is a step backward in key areas of portability and overall utility. Why bother?
But I think that Tivo has two big appeals: no commercials, and "watch what you want, when you want". And it seems to me that the AOL device could deliver on that in spades. I am not really sure I care as much about commercials as I do about when I get to watch. I might even be willing to have the commercials in if it means I don't have to pay extra for a subscription network (like the HBO channel mentioned in the article).
What I am getting at is this: if there is a choice between paying $25/month for cable, plus $25 for the AOL service (commercial content in), or $25 for cable, plus $50 for a service that lets me skip commercials, I think a lot of households (perhaps even mine if my wife saw the bill!) would choose the former.
I grant that personal backup is time consuming and it is tough to find a good method without resorting to expensive tape or hundreds of CDs. But as intriguing as this approach is, there seems like a lot of problems with it.
What if the reason you need to do a recovery is because your system with internet access is toast? How long does it take to restore several hundred thousand files? What about peers that drop off the network, or that are only on sporadically (no, that never happens in peer to peer filesharing networks!).
Even aside from the issues of speed of restoration, I can't imagine too many circumstances in which you want to rely on a internet network connection as a prerequisite for a successful restore... Although perhaps as a way of complimenting existing backup methodologies (i.e. backup root and critical config information to tape or CD, and the rest of your schiznit to DIBS) this might have a place.
Just smells like fear to me. Well, gentlemen, wake up and smell the coffee. It is time to adapt (come up with a better business model that recognizes the range of technology choices available to consumeers) or die. Which is a lot tougher than putting Fritz Hollings in your pocket, isn't it?
Others have said enough to debunk most of what is written here, but let me add in my $0.02, with a storage bias, since that is the analogy you wanted to use.
There is reliable storage and there is unproven storage. Maybe (and I didn't have time to do an in-depth architectural analysis of Traakan) the unproven storage can guarantee me write order fidelity, chache coherency between nodes after a failure (which, incidentally, I don't think EMC can, but that is another story), the ability to support multiple redundant paths from clustered servers to storage, the ability to replicate data to a remote location and guarantee the fidelity of the replication, enormous (64 GB+)caches that ensure the ability of the box to services 10s of thousands of I/Os per second, etc. Maybe. But I doubt it.
More imporantly, even if they could, they simply haven't proven they can. Now, am I going to bet my business (hypothetically, airline reservations) which could lose $10m in an hour of downtime, easily, on this maybe? Never. Others have said it, but it bears repeating: not only do mainframes have legendary reliability, but they have evidence to back it up. It is not just hype.
Until systems based on cheap clusters have been around for a long time, and have pressure tested their OS services, and can actually offer the functionality (not just brochureware), then they are just hype. Interesting hype maybe, but not fit for the data center floor.
Re:Will This be Linux's first killer app?
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 1
MS may not have a commercially shipping product, but they certainly have had working code for a long time. I was on a vendor tour 2.5 years ago, and at that time a manufacturer/parnter of MS was already running a 64-bit MS OS on Intel...
I did ask for it and I appreciate the time you took. Having said that, there is an obvious issue of "unfairness" here about using the judicial system and a large team of lawyers against somebody who will clearly be outmatched financially. Further, it is not the case that I think the motivations of the dutch association are not suspect or even remotely pure. Nor am I dismissive of the ongoing (and previous)discussion here. Passing over all of that...
But to say that it has been discussed before is not to say that there is consensus. When you say that what is going on on P2P networks is solely copyright infringement, and not stealing, I would argue that misses a couple of pretty fundamental concerns:
1) It feels like stealing. It may be a weak argument to resort to "intuition" but I think most of us here have a sense that we are "taking" somebody's property without fair compensation. Pretty close to dictionary defintion 1. (And btw, just because your definition #1 state the item has to be physical, don't mean it is so!). This may not capture all P2Pers, but it sure captures a lot of them: notably, all those who do it because the RIAA is "screwing them" or because the record companies aren't providing the distribution channel we are asking for (the internet). I think it captures alot of the other excuses for not paying for music too...
2) I think we need to distinguish between just "any old file" and a file that is music, and clearly valuable to the owner and artist. I have taken "something" without compensating the owner, and without their permission. When I take something of value without paying for it, over P2P, I think I have met dictionary definition #3. If it is something that somebody would normally be financially compensated for, it becomes theft. That it is an idea is irrelevant, I think. I would even say that the P2P network provides the "surreptitiously" part of the equation. (Not very many but the most injudicious would advertise publicly their enormous collection of downloaded mp3s today!)
So is copyright infringement different than stealing? I think that may be stretching it. It feels far more natural to me to say that it is a subset of stealing, with some unique attributes. But you know what else: I think using the word stealing is useful, because it forces us to think about the issue in a way that pays attention to morally right and wrong.
To say somebody committed copyright infrigement is to only faintly damn them. Joe Sixpack would say "WTF is copyright infringement" and leave it at that. I feel that it almost lets us all of the hook of confronting the issue: is it Wrong? (Big "W" on purpose!) Or is it not? To ask if it is "theft" and "Wrong" is a little more powerful and meaningful (and again, intuitively more comfortable) than to ask if it is "infringement".
Gee nice flame. Ummm... why is it that everybody else here seems to agree that one of the issues is theft? So if copyright infringement in this case is not stealing, why is it not? Be specific please.
Except the Danes really were "stealing" by any commonly accepted definition. The precedent for punishing thieves was set a few millenia ago... you are a little late to the party on that one.
As far as Kazaa goes: you choose to use the service. You know what it entails. If you don't like it, don't use it! Just like TV: don't like content? Change the channel man.
The responses on this board baffle me. Sure, I expected a certain amount of resentment towards the RIAA or whatever acronym they adopt over there, but people here seriously need to redirect their vitriol. Sure, the record companies are a bunch of stupid Fscking dinosaurs who seem incapable of delivering their content in a way that most everybody here has been demanding for years. But... any this is a big but, just like mom told ya: two wrongs don't make a right.
These people were busted. Done deal. People can make all the excuses they want, but it is 99% likely that these people never bought the CDs in the first place, actually downloaded the tracks in question, and where not "framed" or "photoshopped" into guilt. They stole. Now the people they stole from want them to stop it and cough up for their crimes. Good. Just because the RIAA doesn't do business the way that we want doesn't make it any less wrong for Danes to rip them off.
I don't get it. Can someone here explain to me (using valid logic) why just because someone is a total dickhead (the RIAA) it is OK to steal music? Step right up...
A Cicero 8.1 GB PC card drive? Its tough to get more portable than that, and that ought to be enough to accommodate most home users data that can't be easily replicated (apps, mp3 burned from cd).
Failing that, a 40-80 GB USB 2.0 external drive is certainly cheap enough to be practical.
Or, depending on your OS, and the level of firewall protection, and free space, how about using a native backup tool and ftp'ing the image to an alternate place (i.e. work...!)
DVD doesn't appeal to me just because of the expense of the drive, but blue-ray (27 GB devices) could definitely change my mind if they were sub $200.
Thats a bunch of thoughts, there ought to be something there that can satisfy your requirements. Unless of course you have 200+ GB, in which case there is no way to do it fast or cheap... get a tape drive, and try to be a little bit discriminating in what you back up.
Exactly right. AFAIK, most software licenses are NOT transferable. IBM, Sun, Oracle, and MS are all in the same camp on this one: if you buy the license, you and ONLY you own it. You cannot transfer it (because you don't actually own the software, just the RTU). There is a thriving market for used hardware, and none whatsoever for used software. And when you buy a used (Sun, RS/6000, pick your poison) you still have to buy a new OS license etc. from the vendor. So of course the policy sucks, but it is hardly the case that MS is the only offender.
Apparition-X
Slashdot Mirror
Look for an LTO gen 1 or SDLT220/320 on ebay, with a SCSI connection (some of them are fibre, and I assume you don't want to go there!). Don't forget to pick up some tapes. In general, this sounds like it would work if you plan on doing this for a while, and can leverage the initial investment over months or years.
Capacities are (for the cost of a sub $50 tape):
- LTO1: 100 GB uncompressed
- LTO2: 200 GB uncompressed
- SDLT220: 110 GB uncompressed
- SDLT320: 160 GB uncompressed
If your data is particularly ammenable to compression (i.e. database data) you could easily get 3 or 4 to 1 compression with these drives without sinking your CPU utilization.
Good link, thanks. This of course also amply demonstrates why he is a distinguished engineer at Sun and I am just a wannabe posting on /.
I wonder whether future versions will offer predictive capabilities? Imgine being told you are going to have a heart attack in 15 minutes? Now add wireless, and imagine have an ambulance show up, ask you to get in, and take you to the hospital just in time for your impending cardiac arrest. Gee wireless, just in time supply chain, predictive diagnostics, with that many buzzwords, its gonna be a hit for sure!
I dunno, but the Wachowski brothers sure do!
Well, both are true depending on your perspective. For many true fans of SC, the former is more true than the later. Most die hard SC fans will argue that SC is deeper strategically, tactically, doesnt pander to newbies the way WC does, doesnt incorporate dumb 3d elements (which make it harder to play), doesnt automate (autocast) everything, doesnt include luck the way WC3 does (and a real RTS shouldnt), etc.
For most people that didnt spend hundreds of hours with SC, WC3 is pretty damn good. Its learning curve is no where near as steep, it has gorgeous graphics, four races instead of three (which must be better!), and breaks new ground by combining RTS and RPG.
It really is a matter of perspective, and that is all that I was getting at by labelling it both. I am definitely in the former camp, and could spend whole pages of text arguing my point, but that is senseless. And I hope I have enough perspective to know that not everybody will agree with me, and will have their own good reasons for believing what they will.
But, like it or not, SC is a seminal game, and WC3 is enormously important as it will sell millions, and by copied and imitated for years to come.
It doesnt matter if you vilify them (for turning out an execrable piece of garbage like WC3) or laud them for turning out great games (like WC3 or Diablo) they have had a profound influence on the direction of computer gaming in the last 5 years. It is difficult to think of two games that have been more influential, and more copied in their respective genres: SC/WC for real time strategy (RTS) and Diablo for "role-playing".
Although it is tough to separate their individual contributions from those of Blizzard as a whole, they have inarguably produced highly influential games. Significantly, those games have also sold enormous volumes (basically equal in numbers to the Lara Croft series and the GTA series... i.e. several millions of copies of each release).
What is means is that the value of Blizzard just dropped a bit, although perhaps not as much as some are suggesting... a lot of their value resides in their name, their "goodwill" as it is called. And for the masses, who will never even hear of this, the name Blizzard will continue to by synonomous with outstanding games that are probably the least buggy/best supported in the industry (that is sure to get me flamed or modded down!).
It might also mean that some interesting games are in the future assuming you dont buy the theory that Bill ruined WC3. At very least, their departure is a big loss for Blizzard (again, WC3 aside) and a big gain for themselves or some other studio.
No way is correct. The first watch described in the article has bluetooth support for headsets. So I would imagine your watch could be in your backpack, around your belt, or whatever other oddball location should strike your fancy and it would not impair your ability to make calls.
Who knows, with bluetooth being what it is, but it is entirely possible that you could dial from your PDA, and use it as an access point for your PDA when you are not in a hotspot.
Which would be really fsking cool, in my mind.
Which is actually pretty common, in the sense that it is one of a class of solutions designed to deal with that aspect of backup and recovery. Lets face it, not a lot of production systems for big business can afford to be down for the time that it takes to back up the database.
The "third mirror" type of solution is one approach: use the disk hardware itself to make a copy or copies, sometimes virtual or logical only, sometimes physical. Then backup the copy, not the original.
Then there is another class that uses software (host based) to do exactly the same thing: create a logical or physical copy of the data, split it off, back it up, then resynch it. (There are exceptions, so unless you have a specific product in mind, don't hold me to exact process; different specific products have slightly different implementations).
Finally, there is software that can intervene and permit backups even while the application or database is online.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses. None is cheap! And offhand, I would guess that I listed them in order of acceptance by companies (but that is just a guess based on the annecdotal evidence of "what I see in the marketplace").
I can think of two good reasons... OK, well two reasons, you can make up your own mind if they are good or not! Reason one is that tapes, especially tapes handled by humans that get dropped, are not 100% reliable. So there is some advantage to having two copies on tape. The other is centered on disaster recovery: what happens if it is the offsite storage facility that gets irreparably damanged (but not your data centre)? Redundancy is central to disaster recovery.
Anyways, I can see both sides of the issue, and I do appreciate how expensive tape is. But my experience, working with a bunch of different companies on the issue of backp is different: those that could afford two copies did.
The thing that strikes me is the truth or not of that statement really depends on the magnitude of the problem. If we are talking about 1 or 2 TB of data that needs backing up, that is partially true (but a LTO2 drive and 10 200 GB uncompressed tapes is less than 10k).
However, for really large sites that host 25 TB or more, and need to back a good chunk of that up every night (databases) tape is still really the only way to go. A library system capable of holding 100 TB is slightly less than $250k (thats eight LTO2 tape drives and a whole bunch of space to store cartridges). You then need to add in a bunch of money for tapes, and software, and admin. That might double the cost of an annual basis. But only for the first year; after that, you start to get some return on your initial investment.
However, the solution you get meets the #1 rule of backup: anything worth backing up is worth backing up offsite. And this does not mean make a backup, and take it offsite. This means make a backup, and make a second copy and take *that* offsite. Anything else is just not worth doing.
The notion of using disk has a couple other drawbacks: you would pretty much have to compress databases on the client side (and it is not clear to me that has a very good impact on CPU activity levels!) because normally you would trust the very good compression algorithms of the tape drives to do this; and, you would have to have a pretty robust/commercial level database for tracking changes in client data for backup. Also, it seems pretty clear that the environmentals (power, cooling) would cost a lot more using disk rather than tape.
Dont get me wrong, it is a really good idea, whose time may yet come. But without second site copies, it is really not appropriate for use in any major enterprise (i.e. with shareholder and auditor scrutiny!). However, combine the thought with cheap IP data replication to a second array, and you just might have something...
God is dead. (Neitzche) Tape is dead. (Innumerable pundits) Disk is dead. (Conquest FS) Yet somehow, they all seem to be alive and kicking as of right now. I wouldnt be throwing a wake just yet for any of 'em.
The local IBM office has several hundred employees using cisco VOIP phones. It also works fine. There is a big difference between a few ms of latency, and something that is detectable to you or I.
Well, for a lot less money I can get a device that runs Pocket PC 2002, does handwriting recognition just as well as this device (and with all of the functionality you mention above) and is not tied to a desktop somewhere (via 802.11b) to provide the functionality.
.15 of the tablet.
Having used such a device in the real world for a few months now, I have to admit that I love it for its multifunctionality (mp3 player, book, game machine, and as much of a notepad as I ever need for meetings, and all the wireless I need with 802.11b)... but all this can be had for way less than the device reviewed. And the battery lasts just as long. And it weighs
So I fail to see why I would want a tablet. Not only is it not an innovation (CE has the functionality, and took it directly from Newton code IIRC) it is a step backward in key areas of portability and overall utility. Why bother?
But I think that Tivo has two big appeals: no commercials, and "watch what you want, when you want". And it seems to me that the AOL device could deliver on that in spades. I am not really sure I care as much about commercials as I do about when I get to watch. I might even be willing to have the commercials in if it means I don't have to pay extra for a subscription network (like the HBO channel mentioned in the article).
What I am getting at is this: if there is a choice between paying $25/month for cable, plus $25 for the AOL service (commercial content in), or $25 for cable, plus $50 for a service that lets me skip commercials, I think a lot of households (perhaps even mine if my wife saw the bill!) would choose the former.
I grant that personal backup is time consuming and it is tough to find a good method without resorting to expensive tape or hundreds of CDs. But as intriguing as this approach is, there seems like a lot of problems with it.
What if the reason you need to do a recovery is because your system with internet access is toast? How long does it take to restore several hundred thousand files? What about peers that drop off the network, or that are only on sporadically (no, that never happens in peer to peer filesharing networks!).
Even aside from the issues of speed of restoration, I can't imagine too many circumstances in which you want to rely on a internet network connection as a prerequisite for a successful restore... Although perhaps as a way of complimenting existing backup methodologies (i.e. backup root and critical config information to tape or CD, and the rest of your schiznit to DIBS) this might have a place.
Just smells like fear to me. Well, gentlemen, wake up and smell the coffee. It is time to adapt (come up with a better business model that recognizes the range of technology choices available to consumeers) or die. Which is a lot tougher than putting Fritz Hollings in your pocket, isn't it?
Others have said enough to debunk most of what is written here, but let me add in my $0.02, with a storage bias, since that is the analogy you wanted to use.
There is reliable storage and there is unproven storage. Maybe (and I didn't have time to do an in-depth architectural analysis of Traakan) the unproven storage can guarantee me write order fidelity, chache coherency between nodes after a failure (which, incidentally, I don't think EMC can, but that is another story), the ability to support multiple redundant paths from clustered servers to storage, the ability to replicate data to a remote location and guarantee the fidelity of the replication, enormous (64 GB+)caches that ensure the ability of the box to services 10s of thousands of I/Os per second, etc. Maybe. But I doubt it.
More imporantly, even if they could, they simply haven't proven they can. Now, am I going to bet my business (hypothetically, airline reservations) which could lose $10m in an hour of downtime, easily, on this maybe? Never. Others have said it, but it bears repeating: not only do mainframes have legendary reliability, but they have evidence to back it up. It is not just hype.
Until systems based on cheap clusters have been around for a long time, and have pressure tested their OS services, and can actually offer the functionality (not just brochureware), then they are just hype. Interesting hype maybe, but not fit for the data center floor.
MS may not have a commercially shipping product, but they certainly have had working code for a long time. I was on a vendor tour 2.5 years ago, and at that time a manufacturer/parnter of MS was already running a 64-bit MS OS on Intel...
I did ask for it and I appreciate the time you took. Having said that, there is an obvious issue of "unfairness" here about using the judicial system and a large team of lawyers against somebody who will clearly be outmatched financially. Further, it is not the case that I think the motivations of the dutch association are not suspect or even remotely pure. Nor am I dismissive of the ongoing (and previous)discussion here. Passing over all of that...
But to say that it has been discussed before is not to say that there is consensus. When you say that what is going on on P2P networks is solely copyright infringement, and not stealing, I would argue that misses a couple of pretty fundamental concerns:
1) It feels like stealing. It may be a weak argument to resort to "intuition" but I think most of us here have a sense that we are "taking" somebody's property without fair compensation. Pretty close to dictionary defintion 1. (And btw, just because your definition #1 state the item has to be physical, don't mean it is so!). This may not capture all P2Pers, but it sure captures a lot of them: notably, all those who do it because the RIAA is "screwing them" or because the record companies aren't providing the distribution channel we are asking for (the internet). I think it captures alot of the other excuses for not paying for music too...
2) I think we need to distinguish between just "any old file" and a file that is music, and clearly valuable to the owner and artist. I have taken "something" without compensating the owner, and without their permission. When I take something of value without paying for it, over P2P, I think I have met dictionary definition #3. If it is something that somebody would normally be financially compensated for, it becomes theft. That it is an idea is irrelevant, I think. I would even say that the P2P network provides the "surreptitiously" part of the equation. (Not very many but the most injudicious would advertise publicly their enormous collection of downloaded mp3s today!)
So is copyright infringement different than stealing? I think that may be stretching it. It feels far more natural to me to say that it is a subset of stealing, with some unique attributes. But you know what else: I think using the word stealing is useful, because it forces us to think about the issue in a way that pays attention to morally right and wrong.
To say somebody committed copyright infrigement is to only faintly damn them. Joe Sixpack would say "WTF is copyright infringement" and leave it at that. I feel that it almost lets us all of the hook of confronting the issue: is it Wrong? (Big "W" on purpose!) Or is it not? To ask if it is "theft" and "Wrong" is a little more powerful and meaningful (and again, intuitively more comfortable) than to ask if it is "infringement".
Gee nice flame. Ummm... why is it that everybody else here seems to agree that one of the issues is theft? So if copyright infringement in this case is not stealing, why is it not? Be specific please.
Except the Danes really were "stealing" by any commonly accepted definition. The precedent for punishing thieves was set a few millenia ago... you are a little late to the party on that one.
As far as Kazaa goes: you choose to use the service. You know what it entails. If you don't like it, don't use it! Just like TV: don't like content? Change the channel man.
The responses on this board baffle me. Sure, I expected a certain amount of resentment towards the RIAA or whatever acronym they adopt over there, but people here seriously need to redirect their vitriol. Sure, the record companies are a bunch of stupid Fscking dinosaurs who seem incapable of delivering their content in a way that most everybody here has been demanding for years. But... any this is a big but, just like mom told ya: two wrongs don't make a right. These people were busted. Done deal. People can make all the excuses they want, but it is 99% likely that these people never bought the CDs in the first place, actually downloaded the tracks in question, and where not "framed" or "photoshopped" into guilt. They stole. Now the people they stole from want them to stop it and cough up for their crimes. Good. Just because the RIAA doesn't do business the way that we want doesn't make it any less wrong for Danes to rip them off. I don't get it. Can someone here explain to me (using valid logic) why just because someone is a total dickhead (the RIAA) it is OK to steal music? Step right up...
A Cicero 8.1 GB PC card drive? Its tough to get more portable than that, and that ought to be enough to accommodate most home users data that can't be easily replicated (apps, mp3 burned from cd). Failing that, a 40-80 GB USB 2.0 external drive is certainly cheap enough to be practical. Or, depending on your OS, and the level of firewall protection, and free space, how about using a native backup tool and ftp'ing the image to an alternate place (i.e. work...!) DVD doesn't appeal to me just because of the expense of the drive, but blue-ray (27 GB devices) could definitely change my mind if they were sub $200. Thats a bunch of thoughts, there ought to be something there that can satisfy your requirements. Unless of course you have 200+ GB, in which case there is no way to do it fast or cheap... get a tape drive, and try to be a little bit discriminating in what you back up.
Exactly right. AFAIK, most software licenses are NOT transferable. IBM, Sun, Oracle, and MS are all in the same camp on this one: if you buy the license, you and ONLY you own it. You cannot transfer it (because you don't actually own the software, just the RTU). There is a thriving market for used hardware, and none whatsoever for used software. And when you buy a used (Sun, RS/6000, pick your poison) you still have to buy a new OS license etc. from the vendor. So of course the policy sucks, but it is hardly the case that MS is the only offender. Apparition-X