Funny, I thought the whole "net neutrality" issue was due to connectivity providers abusing the high cost of entry and exclusive agreements with local government to maintain an oligopoly so they can shaft people. Google just runs on top of existing infrastructure.
Hard to believe that anyone in that type of position working for an ISP could be so careless. If anyone should know better, they should.
It's probably less a case of knowing better, and more a case of clicking on the wrong file (something like "attach User-list.xls, mailmerge against User-list.xls" instead of "attach User-instructions.doc, mailmerge against User-list.xls"). Knowing that all of us organic beings are subject to error, is a single incident like this something to fire someone over? Or are you saying to fire whichever programmer or spec writer or system architect didn't think to build a mass-mail function into their system?
Every outage you read about involves a failure in a feature of the datacenter that was not redundant and was assumed to not need to be redundant... assumed *incorrectly*.
No, I've also heard about cases where both redundant systems failed at the same time (due to poor maintenance) and where the fire department won't allow the generators to be started. Everything within the datacenter can be redundant, but the datacenter itself still is a single physical location.
Redundancy is irreplaceable.
Distributed fault-tolerant systems are "better", but they're also harder to build. Likewise redundancy is more expensive than lack of redundancy, and if you have to choose between $300k/year for a redundant location with redundant people vs. a million-dollar outage every few years, well, the redundancy might not make sense.
You have to remember how product marketting works in companies. It's not a rational process, but involves someone tabling an idea that catches the imagination of a bunch of droids who quite literally know almost nothing and aren't capable of producing anything themselves --- that's why they're in Marketting after all.
Give the marketeers something that matches their M.O.. A few slogans would be a good start.
Yes, we should do something like the "Intel Inside" stuff, and maybe even find a way to pay companies to include it in their advertisements. If we just give those idiot marketers something pre-packaged like this I'm sure they'll use it, just like Apple uses the actual "Intel Inside" in their ads...
(That "WTF?" you just felt was the realization that marketers are in fact not as stupid as you think they are.)
That would only be necessary if they were planning on distributing Linux, or some other piece of GPL software. I don't think using a piece of software in a larger product is the same thing as distributing the software.
It definitely is, and I seem to recall that the busybox people have won a couple of actual lawsuits over this (not just the typical out-of-court settlements).
(It also apparently doesn't always count as "helping your neighbor" (2), no matter how much that "neighbor" might think it helps them or be willing to pay for it.)
From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?
Eh, more likely they were just blindsided by the sudden availability of word processors and really did think you'd have to hand-write everything indefinitely far into the future.
The underlying problem is how taxes and spending are decoupled. What might be nice to see is "this expensive program will be funded by a tax on that", and I suppose "the overall tax on income is to be shaped like this". And then the individual taxes get calculated by a bunch of accountants somewhere.
Not only could this replace revenue lost from decreased gasoline consumption this wwould allow us to have variable tax rates on various roads. Higher congestion could lead to higher taxes encouraging people to car pool, use mass transit, etc.
Sounds like a horrid mess for everyone, trying to keep track of how much driving a particular route would cost.
In fact, even people who never in their lives used free software benefit greatly from its existence. For example, why do you think there is IE7? Because the rotten monopolist is feeling the heat and losing market share to Mozilla Firefox, they were forced to finally do something to their lame excuse of a browser.
This has nothing to do with Firefox being "Free", and everything to do with it being "competition".
And, if you're a free software user who cannot read or write any code at all, you're still free to hire any person of your choice to do so for you at your command. That breaks the vendor lock-in M$ is so famous for.
Lock-in is never absolute, you can always hire an army of temps to re-enter everything by hand. Hiring someone to fix it won't exactly be cheap, so there can still be significant lock-in.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files.
Only thing is, you're still not locked in, because you can pay ANYONE capable, or use your own expertise to write a relatively simple (compared to the original software) translator to put the data into another format.
This is because, since you have the source, you know the exact format of the data, and can thus extract it in any way you like.
There's no such thing as lock-in, because you can always just pay ANYONE capable, or use your own expertise, to reverse-engineer the file format or wire protocol.
But any sort of custom development is expensive (yes, even with the source code available), so it'd be cheaper to just pay the vendor an extra $10k or whatever. Thus, lock-in.
and so will want "botnet" to mean "any set of two or more compromised computers". But that definition means that the number of windows botnets would be astronomical, so be careful about your definitions.
Did you even read what I linked to? A botnet is a collection of compromised computers that share a Command and Control channel.
Instead I propose the following definition:
Because the generally accepted definitions don't suit your purpose?
This isn't technically a botnet: [...] These are simply rootkitted servers and they appear to have been done manually. The unique aspect of this is that it seems to be coordinated,
Which is what makes it a botnet.
so the MS astroturf team has decided to call it a "botnet".
"define: botnet"... I see nothing in there that precludes manually-compromised systems.
I remember back when you bought a WinDOS machine you got proper install disks
and those install disks would work on any machine you had and would not bother
you with any mandatory license management nonsense.
THAT was a very handy thing. These days, such copies of Windows are few and
far between
And apparently, nobody cares. To the extent that when someone decides they do care, it actually makes the news.
Anymore you can't even get a proper MS Office install package
either.
Even by itself in a store, or is this just for what comes discounted with the computer?
Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
Right, if it was proprietary the replacement would have had to be written from scratch and would have started taking revenue away a week or a month later than otherwise.
If Noscript was proprietary, people would have been stuck with the author's shady practices until some guy comes up with a (bad) free software replacement.
Or someone could write a good free software replacement, or a non-evil proprietary replacement.
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files. You can never be locked in to a particular plaintext editor, no matter how closed it is.
No... Eclipse is an application rather than part of the OS/platform, and IE is either an application or part of Windows depending on when you ask. VMWare I think should probably only be included if you would otherwise include your CPU etc.
I personally think this is a real pity. So much time is being spent on getting drivers implemented that new features and other kinds enhancements are being pushed back.
I would assume that the people writing drivers and the people doing core stuff are not the same people, so there's no "pushed back". Ideally you'd have driver writers employed by all the various hardware manufacturers, while core stuff likely only interests a much smaller group of companies that live higher in the stack (probably just system and support vendors).
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
And that part is exactly what is being discussed here.
Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's a small laptop, or possibly a tablet/e-reader, with a built in phone.
It sounds like it might just be a small laptop (err, "netbook") with an ARM cpu instead of x86:
The smartbooks his company is developing will have screens between 7 and 10 inches, the same size as standard netbook screens.
He said Foxconn's first smartbook will likely be available next year, but added that if Intel puts out a microprocessor that can compete with Arm's chip on price, his company may use that instead and make netbooks.
> The company says the consolidation, which physically separates Microsoft engineers from the servers running their test code
So, if engineers are fare away from the server running their test code, how do they press the reset button when the server shows the BSOD ?!?
They've found a way to punch servers in the face over standard TCP/IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I thought the whole "net neutrality" issue was due to connectivity providers abusing the high cost of entry and exclusive agreements with local government to maintain an oligopoly so they can shaft people. Google just runs on top of existing infrastructure.
The end users may not have the right to modify software. But the owner of a copy of software most certainly has the right to modify that copy.
Which I suppose is why most software tries to be "licensed, not sold", despite looking very much like a sale.
Someone had better lose their job.
Why? And who, exactly?
Hard to believe that anyone in that type of position working for an ISP could be so careless. If anyone should know better, they should.
It's probably less a case of knowing better, and more a case of clicking on the wrong file (something like "attach User-list.xls, mailmerge against User-list.xls" instead of "attach User-instructions.doc, mailmerge against User-list.xls"). Knowing that all of us organic beings are subject to error, is a single incident like this something to fire someone over? Or are you saying to fire whichever programmer or spec writer or system architect didn't think to build a mass-mail function into their system?
when we say "cloud-based," we really just mean "in our data centers."
Pardon my ignorance, but I believe that is what everybody means when they say cloud-based.
I thought "cloud" also required other things, like "this API lets you dynamically add/remove/reimage servers".
Every outage you read about involves a failure in a feature of the datacenter that was not redundant and was assumed to not need to be redundant... assumed *incorrectly*.
No, I've also heard about cases where both redundant systems failed at the same time (due to poor maintenance) and where the fire department won't allow the generators to be started. Everything within the datacenter can be redundant, but the datacenter itself still is a single physical location.
Redundancy is irreplaceable.
Distributed fault-tolerant systems are "better", but they're also harder to build. Likewise redundancy is more expensive than lack of redundancy, and if you have to choose between $300k/year for a redundant location with redundant people vs. a million-dollar outage every few years, well, the redundancy might not make sense.
You have to remember how product marketting works in companies. It's not a rational process, but involves someone tabling an idea that catches the imagination of a bunch of droids who quite literally know almost nothing and aren't capable of producing anything themselves --- that's why they're in Marketting after all.
Give the marketeers something that matches their M.O.. A few slogans would be a good start.
Yes, we should do something like the "Intel Inside" stuff, and maybe even find a way to pay companies to include it in their advertisements. If we just give those idiot marketers something pre-packaged like this I'm sure they'll use it, just like Apple uses the actual "Intel Inside" in their ads...
(That "WTF?" you just felt was the realization that marketers are in fact not as stupid as you think they are.)
That would only be necessary if they were planning on distributing Linux, or some other piece of GPL software. I don't think using a piece of software in a larger product is the same thing as distributing the software.
It definitely is, and I seem to recall that the busybox people have won a couple of actual lawsuits over this (not just the typical out-of-court settlements).
(It also apparently doesn't always count as "helping your neighbor" (2), no matter how much that "neighbor" might think it helps them or be willing to pay for it.)
From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?
Eh, more likely they were just blindsided by the sudden availability of word processors and really did think you'd have to hand-write everything indefinitely far into the future.
I'd program two projects at the same time
It's every programmer's fantasy.
Come work where I work, you could probably even get three or four if you wanted.
And yeah, it really cuts down on the boring dead time waiting for people to clarify requirements or get various dependencies in order.
The underlying problem is how taxes and spending are decoupled. What might be nice to see is "this expensive program will be funded by a tax on that", and I suppose "the overall tax on income is to be shaped like this". And then the individual taxes get calculated by a bunch of accountants somewhere.
Not only could this replace revenue lost from decreased gasoline consumption this wwould allow us to have variable tax rates on various roads. Higher congestion could lead to higher taxes encouraging people to car pool, use mass transit, etc.
Sounds like a horrid mess for everyone, trying to keep track of how much driving a particular route would cost.
In fact, even people who never in their lives used free software benefit greatly from its existence. For example, why do you think there is IE7? Because the rotten monopolist is feeling the heat and losing market share to Mozilla Firefox, they were forced to finally do something to their lame excuse of a browser.
This has nothing to do with Firefox being "Free", and everything to do with it being "competition".
And, if you're a free software user who cannot read or write any code at all, you're still free to hire any person of your choice to do so for you at your command. That breaks the vendor lock-in M$ is so famous for.
Lock-in is never absolute, you can always hire an army of temps to re-enter everything by hand. Hiring someone to fix it won't exactly be cheap, so there can still be significant lock-in.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files.
Only thing is, you're still not locked in, because you can pay ANYONE capable, or use your own expertise to write a relatively simple (compared to the original software) translator to put the data into another format. This is because, since you have the source, you know the exact format of the data, and can thus extract it in any way you like.
There's no such thing as lock-in, because you can always just pay ANYONE capable, or use your own expertise, to reverse-engineer the file format or wire protocol.
But any sort of custom development is expensive (yes, even with the source code available), so it'd be cheaper to just pay the vendor an extra $10k or whatever. Thus, lock-in.
I suspect you are astroturfing for MS here
And I suspect that you are a troll.
and so will want "botnet" to mean "any set of two or more compromised computers". But that definition means that the number of windows botnets would be astronomical, so be careful about your definitions.
Did you even read what I linked to? A botnet is a collection of compromised computers that share a Command and Control channel.
Instead I propose the following definition:
Because the generally accepted definitions don't suit your purpose?
This isn't technically a botnet: [...] These are simply rootkitted servers and they appear to have been done manually. The unique aspect of this is that it seems to be coordinated,
Which is what makes it a botnet.
so the MS astroturf team has decided to call it a "botnet".
"define: botnet" ... I see nothing in there that precludes manually-compromised systems.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
How so? The ability to modify your software and study the source code isn't useful to non-developers, but everyone can distribute.
But it's so much easier to just point people to the project's download page, or tell them to type the name into google...
I remember back when you bought a WinDOS machine you got proper install disks and those install disks would work on any machine you had and would not bother you with any mandatory license management nonsense.
THAT was a very handy thing. These days, such copies of Windows are few and far between
And apparently, nobody cares. To the extent that when someone decides they do care, it actually makes the news.
Anymore you can't even get a proper MS Office install package either.
Even by itself in a store, or is this just for what comes discounted with the computer?
Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
Right, if it was proprietary the replacement would have had to be written from scratch and would have started taking revenue away a week or a month later than otherwise.
If Noscript was proprietary, people would have been stuck with the author's shady practices until some guy comes up with a (bad) free software replacement.
Or someone could write a good free software replacement, or a non-evil proprietary replacement.
There is no OSS or FOSS or FLOSS that does what this system does.
So are you going to tell us what it is that it does?
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
Which are completely useless to the vast majority of people.
This often translates to lower cost - especially in the long term as it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible, but it doesn't have to mean no up-front cost or even no support cost.
I'm not sure I buy this argument... lock-in only requires that nothing else can open your files. You can never be locked in to a particular plaintext editor, no matter how closed it is.
No... Eclipse is an application rather than part of the OS/platform, and IE is either an application or part of Windows depending on when you ask. VMWare I think should probably only be included if you would otherwise include your CPU etc.
I personally think this is a real pity. So much time is being spent on getting drivers implemented that new features and other kinds enhancements are being pushed back.
I would assume that the people writing drivers and the people doing core stuff are not the same people, so there's no "pushed back". Ideally you'd have driver writers employed by all the various hardware manufacturers, while core stuff likely only interests a much smaller group of companies that live higher in the stack (probably just system and support vendors).
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
And that part is exactly what is being discussed here.
Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Or more properly, KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux.
Smartbook? What is this new shitty term?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's a small laptop, or possibly a tablet/e-reader, with a built in phone.
It sounds like it might just be a small laptop (err, "netbook") with an ARM cpu instead of x86:
> The company says the consolidation, which physically separates Microsoft engineers from the servers running their test code
So, if engineers are fare away from the server running their test code, how do they press the reset button when the server shows the BSOD ?!?
They've found a way to punch servers in the face over standard TCP/IP.