MapQuest was THE market leader for years. They've long since fallen by the wayside because of dropped market share - mainly because they lack an open API, but it took quite some time for them to lose out to the big 3's mapping solutions.
There's a lot of love for Google out there, but Yahoo! actually deserves a lot of eyeballs from around here. Their APIs are generally much more robust and much better documented. How many people remember going to Yahoo to resolve LAT&LONG in order to get enough information to get their google maps script working?
Google has plenty of non-search related businesses. Adwords/Adsense is their cash cow, and they maintain that marketshare with ridiculous patents - the kind that would be typically mocked on/. if somebody else owned them. Picassa? Not search related, although they've used their market position in search to give the product market share. Google Code? It's been around for years and hasn't made a dent in the sourceforge/freshmeat/etc. existing marketspace. GOOG-411? Not a dent in the 411 business, and they are FREE! Then there's the GooglePack that tries to install RealPlayer. So much for open source evangelism. Google Docs? No market share, not search related. The list goes on and on and on. It's great that they explore all of these markets, but the revenue machine is contextual ads. You know what... I completely lost track of where I was going with this. (as I'm sure, so did you:)) Anyhow, Google isn't as Good as they get credit for.
The fact that this is news to the guys who built Scrabulous just shows that they haven't done their homework. Mattel has been very aggressive about shutting down online scrabble implementations since the early days of the web.
I think the main point I was trying to get to is that Akamai's patent/solution was innovative, distinct, and not obvious in 1999 when the patent application was originally filed, at least to me.
As far as my last paragraph goes, you don't need Microsoft in the equation to become lazy in the innovation department. All across the tech sector there are companies that have stronger business infrastructures than their innovation infrastructures. It seems at times the two things are in direct conflict. In my personal utopia, they are not.
Edge caching in general is obvious. The implementation is not, and that's what this lawsuit is about.
Limelight copied akamai's patented edge cache implementation, and violated enough of the patent to warrant this decision.
I can see how a bunch of people jump on the "obvious" bandwagon, developing an edge cache for a single enterprise would be relatively easy to do. Developing an edge cache infrastructure that will work across hundreds and thousands of different enterprises with different business and process infrastructures with varying and often conflicting traffic load patterns is an entirely different problem.
Let's look at the url rewriting aspect of it. The rewritten urls are specified to include popularity flag and use virtual hosts as a serial #. Something that would be obvious today, but in '98/'99 not so much.
Let's look at geographic dispersion. What is your obvious geographic dispersion methodology? A database like MaxMind has to offer? Those were few and far between in 1999. They use a network map. Further, they also consider the load of their servers when returning dns responses - so we're not just talking about getting the closest server to the edge, we're talking about getting the closest server with the lowest load at the edge. There's also the problem that the dns request is in most cases not coming from the client machine, but from a geographically disparate dns cache. The akamai system redirects users to a closer server if one exists and that situation is discovered by the web server.
There's also the situation that the network load of a particular server becomes too heavy while serving a particular request midstream (i.e. for audio and video). This patent covers switching the responsibility for handling a request to another server midstream.
This patent also includes anti-DOS/DDOS technology - a no brainer today, but in 1999? Not so much.
I wouldn't categorize Akamai as good or bad. I don't know much about the company itself. I can see the possibility of working around their patent to build a competitor - it's not an all-inclusive-only-we-can-do-CDN patent. But given the fact that limelight's foundation was built by a bunch of Akamai's ex-employees, it certainly isn't surprising that they chose the same path for resolving issues that Akamai did. And given Limelight's close ties with Microsoft, it's also not very surprising that they chose to emulate what they knew rather than innovating and improving upon the model.
Actually (and this comes from the wife of an emmy winning writer), you are wrong. Several writers were fired from shows actively in development (including her husband, who was fired early on in the strike).
One thing I don't see mentioned in the comments is the fact that during the strike many writers were fired, and many shows were cancelled. 24 has decided not to air this season and will continue next season.
It may be a win for some people, but for others they are now out of a job. I don't have a pony in this race, but the strength of the writer's guild is in serious question. One Presidential candidate after another crossed the picket line in favor of publicity. They did not protect the jobs of those who they sought to protect. Actor/Writers crossed the picket line for fear of losing their jobs. And most importantly - many high value shows seemed to be airing new episodes in the middle of the strike.
I'm all for TV coming back, but make no mistake - this strike did not end well for the union. It seems that every labor union in the last several years that has gone on strike (save the port workers who affect the global economy when on strike) has yielded either poor results (eventual acceptance of offers barely different than what was available pre-strike) and in a loss of jobs for unionized workers.
I hate to turn this into a political thing, but the strength of unionized labor vs. corporate dollars has shifted dramatically in favor of corporate dollars.
It sounds like politics to me. Just when ICANN is entertaining proposals to get rid of refundable registrations we get two domain spam articles on the front page. Odd, nothing about this problem before though it has existed for years.
Personally, I don't think it's an ICANN issue to get rid of domain spammers. Like any good capitalist, I think the market should take care of itself. Major advertisers should shun the money from Domain Parking - much like Google did in the past. Smaller companies should press to get the option to NOT display their ads on parked domains. Consumers should do like I do and immediately close a parked adspam page as soon as I accidentally hit it.
The more difficult it is to make money from random domains, the less people will want to enter and remain in the market space. If you're looking for someone to blame, look directly at the big boy - Google:
1) Their ranking system for quite some time encouraged people to run as many domains as possible. The more crappy micro-sites and parked domains that pointed to your pages with keyword anchors, the higher your results. 2) Pagerank. How many sites exist on the net for the sole purpose of pagerank. 3) Adsense. They came up with the main monetization model for domain parking spam and webspam in general.
Google has made sweeping changes in the past to get rid of spam and sometimes they have worked to great effect. To actually make sweeping changes to get rid of domain spam they would have to attack their own revenue model - a revenue model that accounts for at least 80% of google's income, and this isn't something the stockholders will see as a good thing unless there is a clear path to long term gains as a result. So really, Google has brought us spam and while they do have the power to take it away they won't do it in the short term. It's interesting, though - the dichotomy of the whole thing. Google is one of the companies that made the web as powerful as it is. And they are also one of the companies that made it as crappy as it could be.
The slashdot crowd reaction could be predicted from a mile off. U2 is banking on the fact that the slashdot crowd has little effect on their fan base as a whole, and frankly I would be surprised if we did have much of an effect on future sales for U2.
The idea, I think, is that other media has more of a stronghold on the consumer base than the internet does. The internet community will grow inevitably, so better to oppose that community now, while you still have influential power.
I think domain tasting has taken a turn over the years, but lets not forget why it was here in the first place.
These days, I have no idea how I would go about registering a domain without paying for it. I don't see the option readily available at any registrars that I work with (although, I personally stay away from the big guns like godaddy and network solutions). It seems to me that the people who are doing it tend to be those who want to park domains and put ads up temporarily - and frankly I am opposed to this - as it's nothing but spam.
Would getting rid of the tasting option get rid of these guys? No. It takes a minimal investment to create a certified registrar and at that point domain purchases are cheap enough that you can buy them in bulk at a price point that doesn't do much to preclude the web-spam business model.
But looking back at the reasons for this in the first place - one might want to register a domain, but not have the money to do it immediately. One might change their mind about a registration. Yeah, in the days of $5 and $10 domains, these points seem to lose a great deal of value, but there was a time when it would cost you more than $100 to register a domain. There was also a time when dictionary words and 3 letter domains were widely available because there was no market for commerce on the internet.
If a registrar were to make widely available the "pay in a week" model I certainly would not be opposed to it. If you want to attack the web-spam business model, I think you should do so directly - much like Google is doing.
There are a thousand ways to root a machine, and there are a lot of ways to configure apache so that it's either very secure or very insecure - but really apache is just one attack vector. Being that all the machines that exhibited distribution of the windows malware, it may be a common configuration problem between those servers - but how many servers do they know about that were distributing the software? 10? 1000? 10,000? You would think if there were that many of them it there would be incremental backups that you could look through to see what was going on in the system.
Logically assuming that it is just a handful of servers based on the fact that nobody has pinpointed the problem, more likely it's that the server admins are either the problem, or it is an attack on a very specific configuration and software combination.
When the decision of whether or not to allow Breathalyzer evidence into court came into play, they downplayed the inaccuracy issues by a factor of 10. I want to say they report inaccurate results 20% of the time and they claimed a 2% error rate, but you'll have to ask jeeves or google if you want the right numbers.
The parallel I see is that the damage is done and at this point it is unlikely to be undone.
They presented the argument they wanted to the people they wanted when they wanted to do it. Although many universities do not have programs in place to prevent piracy, the wheels are in motion and the fact that the decision to do so was based on inaccurate information will not stop anything.
Because Java and.Net came up with solutions doesn't mean that there isn't another answer to the question. Perl has taken different directions than the common or obvious answer would provide in the past with some very strong results.
As far as Haskell, I don't know the reason why.
"Because we can" and "I feel like it" are definitely the impression I do not receive from the perl developer community. What I see are people suggesting things, people having intelligent debate about them, and I see people implementing the results of those debates - both with CPAN modules and with perl itself.
Why not pose your question on the Perl developers list or over at useperl. I'm sure you would get a much better response than what I can provide.
I'm not sure why anybody is up in arms about a Perl6 release date. It takes a long time to get done. That's the way the world works. This isn't a platform with a fixed set of requirements, a predictable user base, and limited scalability requirements.
People have been arguing for who knows how long about syntax. At some point the argument has to end and someone has to implement that syntax. It's not an easy thing to bring either of these points to conclusion.
Parrot is register based, not stack based. Perl has been developed using Haskell, and eventually it will come to the point where perl can be compiled with itself. These are monumental tasks for volunteer workers pursuing some pretty hefty goals for the sake of pursuing them.
Pugs has been working for quite some time already, and its an easy transition for anybody already familiar with perl.
I can see criticizing the project because it's hard for a newbie to figure out how to help, or criticizing the syntax in favor of ruby/python/etc, or criticizing performance (although both Perl6 and Parrot perform very well IMO), but criticizing the time it has taken to build? Get off your high horse and go build your next big Web 2.0 script that can do anything as long as you have less than 100 daily visitors.
The value of any company is based on the kind of revenue it can generate. The measurements for an OSS company have to be different because they not only can generate revenue directly, i.e. through support contracts, but also they can generate a great deal of money indirectly - through community influence.
There is also the issue of operating costs and how predictable they are.
One must also take into account intellectual property, but relatively few open source projects maintain intellectual property of their own.
For instance, take MySQL. MySQL has one of the largest install bases for a server side application. Taking advantage of the installed base to influence the kinds of functionality people are implementing could be very powerful. There is a very loose connection between MySQL and their installed base, however, so marketing directly to existing customers would not predictably yield a high percentage of success. There's no magic formula for most OSS companies. I think the value must truly be discerned by the way the purchaser intends to utilize the project and it's community.
The more obvious the potential revenue streams, the more potential suitors a project has, and therefore a higher value will need to be placed on it. Also, the predictability of the revenue streams is important. The easier it is to predict how much can be gained through the purchase, the more comfortable businesses will be in making the decision to swallow the project.
With many projects there is also the issue of competition, and how the purchase would influence a market niche. Urchin wasn't OSS, but Google's purchase of Urchin gave their technology mass marketshare nearly overnight and changed the dynamic of the web stats niche dramatically. The value in Urchin wasn't their sales - Google understood the value of influence and information and that particular purchase was very key to their overall strategy and in maintaining the search engine market share that they enjoy.
This article was written from the perspective that map-reduce based architectures is in competition with common relational database architecture. It's not.
Certainly if you were to implement map-reduce within the confines of the relational database world, there are implementation methodologies that would need to be taken to make it easier for the RDBMS developer to work with the storage and querying mechanisms.
The article implies that map-reduce is bad because it doesn't place restrictions common to the database world on developers. When you get down to programming anything at a basic level, the implementation of standards is an optional step to take.
I would agree that abstraction and structure would be good things because developers would be able to concentrate on higher level problems, but I would strongly disagree that anybody learning about map-reduce algorithms should be confined to a particular implementation methodology.
There are plenty of tools capable of deploying firefox. I think the biggest problem in adoption is the number of enterprise applications that have IE specific functionality. Things are getting better, but too often I see applications that only support IE - sometimes because their javascript isn't cross-browser capable, sometimes because of ActiveX extensions, etc. Sometimes it's just because the software vendor didn't want to incur the support costs for adding another browser to the list of supported platforms.
Slightly off topic, but I've been looking for a decent (inexpensive) source for fiber optic cables for doing a small star-ceiling.
I was actually thinking of using these guys - , but I would be interested if anybody could come up with alternative recommendations. I poked around a little and I can't seem to find any consumer sources for plastic fiber. (you know, other than the bait and tackle shop)
I've been thinking this over ever since I realized that Mongrel and Rails more or less killed my career. During 2006 I was effectively homeless for about 4-6 months out of the year and made no money at all.
So after 6 months of homeless living, he continued to work on the project for another year and a half? That's dedication. I always thought people were giving those guys money for charity on the freeway. I had no idea you could trade them hamburgers for software development.
It's a pretty big accomplishment for Ruby to push a guy into homelessness too. Think about all the WoW guys out there just playing a video game day in and day out. Those guys all have homes. I can't think of another product that will push people out into the street. Kazaa with all the RIAA's assistance hasn't even done that yet. I suppose that makes it a feature.
The dataset linked in the summary looks pretty useless and is really meant to:
This file contains a portion of the actual or raw responses collected in Section A of the air carrier surveys to show the breadth and scope of the pilot community surveyed and the types of aircraft flown.
Although - these are really just answers to questions. I've spent some time going through the various links and I don't see anything that describes the questions that most of the columns relate to - although this file seems to contain the most information about the results. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/207238main_NAOMS%20Reference%20Report_508.pdf
From perlop:
Note that it's possible to confuse Perl into thinking// (the empty regex) is really// (the defined-or operator). Perl is usually pretty good about this, but some pathological cases might trigger this, such as $a/// (is that ($a) / (//) or $a///?) and print $fh// (print $fh(// or print($fh//?). In all of these examples, Perl will assume you meant defined-or. If you meant the empty regex, just use parentheses or spaces to disambiguate, or even prefix the empty regex with an m (so// becomes m//). I can't think of any instances where I ever used code that would be ambiguous, but it helps to spread the word. I can imagine this is going to be a major headache for some people trying figure out why their old code doesn't work.
This would be a problem considering that the bulk of their lawsuits are based on MediaSentry downloads via Kazaa. Kazaa is around no more, which means that there is no investigation to be made.
What they didn't want is for their suit to be thrown out with the Kitchen sink because of their reliance on information provided by unlicensed investigators. If that happens, they lose anybody in the state who is looking to settle anytime soon.
As it stands, it will take some time before another defendant even has the chance to bring this subject to light again and when they do, the RIAA will have had a much longer time to come up with a good argument for the judge - or even perhaps engineer the argument to be presented to a judge who would be receptive to their arguments.
They bought time. The grandma closed the door on the case. We'll see what happens with the next guy.
That link doesn't work either. It looks like they are handling all that traffic by denying access to the content. I guess that's one way of dealing with it:/
Assuming the work is performed in Maryland, then the answer is yes.
Not charging taxes on goods sold to an out of state entity is a grey area at best. If you call the Franchise Tax Board, they will tell you that sales tax must be paid - at least that's how I've been told things work here in California.
Taxes on services, however, are much more clear. You pay the tax based on where the service is performed.
Slashdot Mirror
MapQuest was THE market leader for years. They've long since fallen by the wayside because of dropped market share - mainly because they lack an open API, but it took quite some time for them to lose out to the big 3's mapping solutions.
/. if somebody else owned them. Picassa? Not search related, although they've used their market position in search to give the product market share. Google Code? It's been around for years and hasn't made a dent in the sourceforge/freshmeat/etc. existing marketspace. GOOG-411? Not a dent in the 411 business, and they are FREE! Then there's the GooglePack that tries to install RealPlayer. So much for open source evangelism. Google Docs? No market share, not search related. The list goes on and on and on. It's great that they explore all of these markets, but the revenue machine is contextual ads. You know what... I completely lost track of where I was going with this. (as I'm sure, so did you :)) Anyhow, Google isn't as Good as they get credit for.
There's a lot of love for Google out there, but Yahoo! actually deserves a lot of eyeballs from around here. Their APIs are generally much more robust and much better documented. How many people remember going to Yahoo to resolve LAT&LONG in order to get enough information to get their google maps script working?
Google has plenty of non-search related businesses. Adwords/Adsense is their cash cow, and they maintain that marketshare with ridiculous patents - the kind that would be typically mocked on
The fact that this is news to the guys who built Scrabulous just shows that they haven't done their homework. Mattel has been very aggressive about shutting down online scrabble implementations since the early days of the web.
I won't argue your points.
I think the main point I was trying to get to is that Akamai's patent/solution was innovative, distinct, and not obvious in 1999 when the patent application was originally filed, at least to me.
As far as my last paragraph goes, you don't need Microsoft in the equation to become lazy in the innovation department. All across the tech sector there are companies that have stronger business infrastructures than their innovation infrastructures. It seems at times the two things are in direct conflict. In my personal utopia, they are not.
Edge caching in general is obvious. The implementation is not, and that's what this lawsuit is about.
Limelight copied akamai's patented edge cache implementation, and violated enough of the patent to warrant this decision.
I can see how a bunch of people jump on the "obvious" bandwagon, developing an edge cache for a single enterprise would be relatively easy to do. Developing an edge cache infrastructure that will work across hundreds and thousands of different enterprises with different business and process infrastructures with varying and often conflicting traffic load patterns is an entirely different problem.
Let's look at the url rewriting aspect of it. The rewritten urls are specified to include popularity flag and use virtual hosts as a serial #. Something that would be obvious today, but in '98/'99 not so much.
Let's look at geographic dispersion. What is your obvious geographic dispersion methodology? A database like MaxMind has to offer? Those were few and far between in 1999. They use a network map. Further, they also consider the load of their servers when returning dns responses - so we're not just talking about getting the closest server to the edge, we're talking about getting the closest server with the lowest load at the edge. There's also the problem that the dns request is in most cases not coming from the client machine, but from a geographically disparate dns cache. The akamai system redirects users to a closer server if one exists and that situation is discovered by the web server.
There's also the situation that the network load of a particular server becomes too heavy while serving a particular request midstream (i.e. for audio and video). This patent covers switching the responsibility for handling a request to another server midstream.
This patent also includes anti-DOS/DDOS technology - a no brainer today, but in 1999? Not so much.
I wouldn't categorize Akamai as good or bad. I don't know much about the company itself. I can see the possibility of working around their patent to build a competitor - it's not an all-inclusive-only-we-can-do-CDN patent. But given the fact that limelight's foundation was built by a bunch of Akamai's ex-employees, it certainly isn't surprising that they chose the same path for resolving issues that Akamai did. And given Limelight's close ties with Microsoft, it's also not very surprising that they chose to emulate what they knew rather than innovating and improving upon the model.
Actually (and this comes from the wife of an emmy winning writer), you are wrong. Several writers were fired from shows actively in development (including her husband, who was fired early on in the strike).
One thing I don't see mentioned in the comments is the fact that during the strike many writers were fired, and many shows were cancelled. 24 has decided not to air this season and will continue next season.
It may be a win for some people, but for others they are now out of a job. I don't have a pony in this race, but the strength of the writer's guild is in serious question. One Presidential candidate after another crossed the picket line in favor of publicity. They did not protect the jobs of those who they sought to protect. Actor/Writers crossed the picket line for fear of losing their jobs. And most importantly - many high value shows seemed to be airing new episodes in the middle of the strike.
I'm all for TV coming back, but make no mistake - this strike did not end well for the union. It seems that every labor union in the last several years that has gone on strike (save the port workers who affect the global economy when on strike) has yielded either poor results (eventual acceptance of offers barely different than what was available pre-strike) and in a loss of jobs for unionized workers.
I hate to turn this into a political thing, but the strength of unionized labor vs. corporate dollars has shifted dramatically in favor of corporate dollars.
It sounds like politics to me. Just when ICANN is entertaining proposals to get rid of refundable registrations we get two domain spam articles on the front page. Odd, nothing about this problem before though it has existed for years.
Personally, I don't think it's an ICANN issue to get rid of domain spammers. Like any good capitalist, I think the market should take care of itself. Major advertisers should shun the money from Domain Parking - much like Google did in the past. Smaller companies should press to get the option to NOT display their ads on parked domains. Consumers should do like I do and immediately close a parked adspam page as soon as I accidentally hit it.
The more difficult it is to make money from random domains, the less people will want to enter and remain in the market space. If you're looking for someone to blame, look directly at the big boy - Google:
1) Their ranking system for quite some time encouraged people to run as many domains as possible. The more crappy micro-sites and parked domains that pointed to your pages with keyword anchors, the higher your results.
2) Pagerank. How many sites exist on the net for the sole purpose of pagerank.
3) Adsense. They came up with the main monetization model for domain parking spam and webspam in general.
Google has made sweeping changes in the past to get rid of spam and sometimes they have worked to great effect. To actually make sweeping changes to get rid of domain spam they would have to attack their own revenue model - a revenue model that accounts for at least 80% of google's income, and this isn't something the stockholders will see as a good thing unless there is a clear path to long term gains as a result. So really, Google has brought us spam and while they do have the power to take it away they won't do it in the short term. It's interesting, though - the dichotomy of the whole thing. Google is one of the companies that made the web as powerful as it is. And they are also one of the companies that made it as crappy as it could be.
The slashdot crowd reaction could be predicted from a mile off. U2 is banking on the fact that the slashdot crowd has little effect on their fan base as a whole, and frankly I would be surprised if we did have much of an effect on future sales for U2.
The idea, I think, is that other media has more of a stronghold on the consumer base than the internet does. The internet community will grow inevitably, so better to oppose that community now, while you still have influential power.
I think domain tasting has taken a turn over the years, but lets not forget why it was here in the first place.
These days, I have no idea how I would go about registering a domain without paying for it. I don't see the option readily available at any registrars that I work with (although, I personally stay away from the big guns like godaddy and network solutions). It seems to me that the people who are doing it tend to be those who want to park domains and put ads up temporarily - and frankly I am opposed to this - as it's nothing but spam.
Would getting rid of the tasting option get rid of these guys? No. It takes a minimal investment to create a certified registrar and at that point domain purchases are cheap enough that you can buy them in bulk at a price point that doesn't do much to preclude the web-spam business model.
But looking back at the reasons for this in the first place - one might want to register a domain, but not have the money to do it immediately. One might change their mind about a registration. Yeah, in the days of $5 and $10 domains, these points seem to lose a great deal of value, but there was a time when it would cost you more than $100 to register a domain. There was also a time when dictionary words and 3 letter domains were widely available because there was no market for commerce on the internet.
If a registrar were to make widely available the "pay in a week" model I certainly would not be opposed to it. If you want to attack the web-spam business model, I think you should do so directly - much like Google is doing.
There are a thousand ways to root a machine, and there are a lot of ways to configure apache so that it's either very secure or very insecure - but really apache is just one attack vector. Being that all the machines that exhibited distribution of the windows malware, it may be a common configuration problem between those servers - but how many servers do they know about that were distributing the software? 10? 1000? 10,000? You would think if there were that many of them it there would be incremental backups that you could look through to see what was going on in the system.
Logically assuming that it is just a handful of servers based on the fact that nobody has pinpointed the problem, more likely it's that the server admins are either the problem, or it is an attack on a very specific configuration and software combination.
When the decision of whether or not to allow Breathalyzer evidence into court came into play, they downplayed the inaccuracy issues by a factor of 10. I want to say they report inaccurate results 20% of the time and they claimed a 2% error rate, but you'll have to ask jeeves or google if you want the right numbers.
The parallel I see is that the damage is done and at this point it is unlikely to be undone.
They presented the argument they wanted to the people they wanted when they wanted to do it. Although many universities do not have programs in place to prevent piracy, the wheels are in motion and the fact that the decision to do so was based on inaccurate information will not stop anything.
As quickly as the issue is reported, a hack comes out to resolve it. Gotta love how quickly the community can respond to these things.
Because Java and .Net came up with solutions doesn't mean that there isn't another answer to the question. Perl has taken different directions than the common or obvious answer would provide in the past with some very strong results.
As far as Haskell, I don't know the reason why.
"Because we can" and "I feel like it" are definitely the impression I do not receive from the perl developer community. What I see are people suggesting things, people having intelligent debate about them, and I see people implementing the results of those debates - both with CPAN modules and with perl itself.
Why not pose your question on the Perl developers list or over at useperl. I'm sure you would get a much better response than what I can provide.
I'm not sure why anybody is up in arms about a Perl6 release date. It takes a long time to get done. That's the way the world works. This isn't a platform with a fixed set of requirements, a predictable user base, and limited scalability requirements.
People have been arguing for who knows how long about syntax. At some point the argument has to end and someone has to implement that syntax. It's not an easy thing to bring either of these points to conclusion.
Parrot is register based, not stack based. Perl has been developed using Haskell, and eventually it will come to the point where perl can be compiled with itself. These are monumental tasks for volunteer workers pursuing some pretty hefty goals for the sake of pursuing them.
Pugs has been working for quite some time already, and its an easy transition for anybody already familiar with perl.
I can see criticizing the project because it's hard for a newbie to figure out how to help, or criticizing the syntax in favor of ruby/python/etc, or criticizing performance (although both Perl6 and Parrot perform very well IMO), but criticizing the time it has taken to build? Get off your high horse and go build your next big Web 2.0 script that can do anything as long as you have less than 100 daily visitors.
The value of any company is based on the kind of revenue it can generate. The measurements for an OSS company have to be different because they not only can generate revenue directly, i.e. through support contracts, but also they can generate a great deal of money indirectly - through community influence.
There is also the issue of operating costs and how predictable they are.
One must also take into account intellectual property, but relatively few open source projects maintain intellectual property of their own.
For instance, take MySQL. MySQL has one of the largest install bases for a server side application. Taking advantage of the installed base to influence the kinds of functionality people are implementing could be very powerful. There is a very loose connection between MySQL and their installed base, however, so marketing directly to existing customers would not predictably yield a high percentage of success. There's no magic formula for most OSS companies. I think the value must truly be discerned by the way the purchaser intends to utilize the project and it's community.
The more obvious the potential revenue streams, the more potential suitors a project has, and therefore a higher value will need to be placed on it. Also, the predictability of the revenue streams is important. The easier it is to predict how much can be gained through the purchase, the more comfortable businesses will be in making the decision to swallow the project.
With many projects there is also the issue of competition, and how the purchase would influence a market niche. Urchin wasn't OSS, but Google's purchase of Urchin gave their technology mass marketshare nearly overnight and changed the dynamic of the web stats niche dramatically. The value in Urchin wasn't their sales - Google understood the value of influence and information and that particular purchase was very key to their overall strategy and in maintaining the search engine market share that they enjoy.
This article was written from the perspective that map-reduce based architectures is in competition with common relational database architecture. It's not.
Certainly if you were to implement map-reduce within the confines of the relational database world, there are implementation methodologies that would need to be taken to make it easier for the RDBMS developer to work with the storage and querying mechanisms.
The article implies that map-reduce is bad because it doesn't place restrictions common to the database world on developers. When you get down to programming anything at a basic level, the implementation of standards is an optional step to take.
I would agree that abstraction and structure would be good things because developers would be able to concentrate on higher level problems, but I would strongly disagree that anybody learning about map-reduce algorithms should be confined to a particular implementation methodology.
There are plenty of tools capable of deploying firefox. I think the biggest problem in adoption is the number of enterprise applications that have IE specific functionality. Things are getting better, but too often I see applications that only support IE - sometimes because their javascript isn't cross-browser capable, sometimes because of ActiveX extensions, etc. Sometimes it's just because the software vendor didn't want to incur the support costs for adding another browser to the list of supported platforms.
Slightly off topic, but I've been looking for a decent (inexpensive) source for fiber optic cables for doing a small star-ceiling.
I was actually thinking of using these guys - , but I would be interested if anybody could come up with alternative recommendations. I poked around a little and I can't seem to find any consumer sources for plastic fiber. (you know, other than the bait and tackle shop)
So after 6 months of homeless living, he continued to work on the project for another year and a half? That's dedication. I always thought people were giving those guys money for charity on the freeway. I had no idea you could trade them hamburgers for software development.
It's a pretty big accomplishment for Ruby to push a guy into homelessness too. Think about all the WoW guys out there just playing a video game day in and day out. Those guys all have homes. I can't think of another product that will push people out into the street. Kazaa with all the RIAA's assistance hasn't even done that yet. I suppose that makes it a feature.
More interesting data that was released is here: http://www.nasa.gov/news/reports/NAOMS_air_carrier_survey_data.html
Although - these are really just answers to questions. I've spent some time going through the various links and I don't see anything that describes the questions that most of the columns relate to - although this file seems to contain the most information about the results. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/207238main_NAOMS%20Reference%20Report_508.pdf
This would be a problem considering that the bulk of their lawsuits are based on MediaSentry downloads via Kazaa. Kazaa is around no more, which means that there is no investigation to be made.
What they didn't want is for their suit to be thrown out with the Kitchen sink because of their reliance on information provided by unlicensed investigators. If that happens, they lose anybody in the state who is looking to settle anytime soon.
As it stands, it will take some time before another defendant even has the chance to bring this subject to light again and when they do, the RIAA will have had a much longer time to come up with a good argument for the judge - or even perhaps engineer the argument to be presented to a judge who would be receptive to their arguments.
They bought time. The grandma closed the door on the case. We'll see what happens with the next guy.
That link doesn't work either. It looks like they are handling all that traffic by denying access to the content. I guess that's one way of dealing with it :/
73 comments and NO mention of the death star?!?
Assuming the work is performed in Maryland, then the answer is yes.
Not charging taxes on goods sold to an out of state entity is a grey area at best. If you call the Franchise Tax Board, they will tell you that sales tax must be paid - at least that's how I've been told things work here in California.
Taxes on services, however, are much more clear. You pay the tax based on where the service is performed.