I got the transgaming notice that I can download the latest with special half life 2 support, and I love all the half life games to date, but I like to buy games that I can *keep* and *own* and play on normally accepted terms. This scares me more and more away from buying the game.
A, um.. friend of mine, has downloaded probably a dozen movies off the Internet. He's bought 4 movies on DVD at full retail from Best Buy as a result of seeing these movies and wanting to have a DVD quality copy/support the makers/etc. Of the other 8 or so about half were bad movies, and he did not buy DVD's. The other half he only downloaded because they were still in theaters, and hollywood's idiotic policy means you can't watch it at home for months after the initial release, so he bought the DVD's once they were out. For example, he had the first 2 lord of the rings on full quality DVD almost a year before the actual DVD was out. These movies he saw in the theater more than once each, and has purchased both the normal versions and extended.
Again, him pirating movies has led to more purchases, and therefore more revenue for the MPAA.
Show me a court case where this has happened and I'll tell people to worry.
I'd wager that a jury won't agree with your lawyers slicing of the hair. When you connect to Steam, do you not "agree" to a license to use it? When you start downloading an app on a.torrent you have no license. You are violating the copyright holders claim to have a license. But if they are party to, and/or facilitate you in getting a copy of their copyrighted work(s), all bets are off.
Also, Your DVD has a nice little part that says something like this is authorized only for private viewings, no distribution, etc. So, if, the copyright holder gave me a special DVD that had a notice saying I could copy it and sell it, then I could. It's all civil issues, or was, until the MPAA/RIAA bought the government.
Now, I'm not advocating piracy, I have many times in the past defended anti-piracy acts, and I think piracy hurts the things I use like Linux. But I think your lawyer friend is one of many lawyers, and if they all agreed on anything then we wouldn't have court now would we.
If *any* copyright holder connected to a.torrent of something they claim violated their copyright. It would be *very* easy for a lawyer to demonstrate that once they started giving you a copy of the file they were also giving you permission to use it, and therefore not only did they lose their legal case, but you got a free, legal, copy.
I'm not sure if this counts as being under the PDA thread, but these are both PDA / cell phones. I've recently ditched the Samsung i600 for a Blackberry 7750, and I couldn't say enough bad things about the Windows 2003 Mobile device that Verizon has the misfortune of selling.
These things (i600s) simply do not work as advertised. Verizon is lying on their page that says product info. For instance, they claim 240 hours of standby battery time with the default battery. Now, Windows 2003 upgrade has doubled battery performance, where I can almost get 1 full day (24 hours) STANDBY time on my i600 with the normal battery, this is with 0 use. They do include a double size battery that you can actually use for 1 morning-night period of normal use, but heavy use? forget it with these. One of the people at work had one and went hunting, kept the extended battery connected but the phone OFF for the friday night-sunday afternoon time frame, and the battery was DEAD when he got back. So, if you used BOTH batterys, and the phone was OFF the entire time, you would NOT get the 240 hours "STANDBY" time that Verizon claims on their page.
Next problem is basically a BSOD on these things, The same guy who took his hunting just got his replaced with a brand new one from Samsung because he couldn't make calls. Now he can't RECEIVE calls. If you call his phone it crashes. The interior display goes black, and the exterior LCD says "missed call".. We had 11 of these phones, and every single one was junk, was quirky, did NOT perform anywhere near as advertised.
The data sync.. forget about it. One day you get emails with only a 20-30 minute delay, next day no emails come to your phone, next day you get duplicates of the same emails you got the first day, but still none from the second day...
Anyways, I'll wait for the class action, in the meantime, DO NOT BUY Samsung i600's with Windows on them, they are total garbage...
Oh, if you want to ignore me, I still have 9 of them for sale $300 each, gently used.
I'd highly recommend a LAMP setup with ip virtual server
My experience says apache/php/mysql(or postgresql) is a good way to scale.
Buy 2 good load balancers with redundant power supplies, SCSI disks with hardware RAID. Depending on how much database your app needs that's where your hardest to avoid point of failure will be, look into what slashdot does for high performance, I forget the name of the software but it's a distributed caching type system, linux journal had an article about it and it looked very interesting.
Also, find out how much load you need to support, high traffic means a lot of different things different people. Use siege to slam your setup once you think its good. Make charts and graphs of the data, you won't really understand the data until you try to process it into something that you can explain to someone else.
When it comes down to it your biggest bottleneck will often be your pipe. 2 fast ipvs load balancers, 10 web servers, and 2 big database servers could easily handle more than the 1 ethernet connection your isp provides if you're hosting moderate database sites.
Also, it's very your database performance is going to be the killer once you go into production, design your schema very well, and test it extensively. monitor all your queries which ones cost the most, and optimize them. Have a test AND a stage environment similar if not identical to your production one, and USE IT!
Make sure you know how to use all your tools, there's nothing like trying to search through man pages while your site is down. Make sure you have redundancy in personel, whether all on staff, or consultants. Make schedules and let people know who is responsible.
Oh, and monitor it like crazy, from at least 2 differnet sites that can page you 24x7, and don't ignore your pager at 3am just cuz you're asleep.
Also, make backups like crazy, the largest percentage of your disk and storage in general should be used by backups! Test restores of your backups on your test environment.
One final thing then I'll go, don't be afraid of buying things on eBay. Redundancy is worth more than speed when you're in a 24x7 environment. I really like to buy 3 year old servers and fibre disk arrays there for 1/10th the cost new. These were $30k servers 3-4 years ago, now going for $200-800, they have 3 redundant power supplies, hardware RAID controllers, multiple PCI buses, quad processors, 1-4GB ram, and run great. Also the SAN market on eBay is very saturated with sellers, and you can ignore anything that's close to retail price. I've seen 10x36GB disk fibre arrays with full dual redundant power supplies and controllers for $199 buy it now, and not broken crappy ones. I've got a 10x18GB one, software RAID 0 under Linux I get 95MB/sec sustained (20GB files) reads and writes. (In Windows 2000 server and Windows XP I get about 35MB/sec doing the similar software RAID 0, this is one of many reasons you should ALREADY know not to try to use windows in a production environement on the web)
I'm envious, I love setting stuff like that up! It's my favorite thing to do in IT!!
Whew, have a good day.
I have this, since it was the qcast station.
You CAN fast forward and rewind with the latest version.
It WAS usable to play some divx/mpg and all mp3/ogg and jpg's on your tv.
A modded Xbox kills it in every way now, and the company no longer supports/develops it as far as I can tell from their forums (broadq.com).
It is slow loading, you can't turn of ps2 remotely, the playlist interface I don't find really bad, it's more analagous to a gaming interface than to a remote, which seems to fit it being on a ps2 and controlled using a gamepad.
I'd go for a modded Xbox, throw in a 200GB drive and a mod chip for about $130-150 more than the used xbox for $99 ish, put all your crap on it, boots up pretty fast, can have component out, can play real xbox games, or just have all your mp3's/video/pictures on your xbox, accessable over ftp... that's what I'm getting for xmas
sorry but a non free email alternative is not an alternative to a free email. If gmail/hotmail/yahoo/whoever charged money for the account I wouldn't have 15 email accounts.
There are 3 things going on here in your post.. First, open source works are generally copyright their respective creators, and released to you in source form under a restrictive license like the GNU Public License, which allows you to reuse it as long as you keep the same license and give your changes back to the community.
Second, you're talking about key generators, cracked security keys, etc, largely used for piracy. Most open source advocated are NOT pirates of music or software. And, many would argue that software piracy greatly hurts the value of open source software since people don't realize the true cost of the software they pirate. This is not a motivation for typical open source advocates to crack things.
Third, you're talking about fairly using something that someone has attempted to unfairly restrict your use of. This is where iTunes and deCSS fall under. If I go to Best Buy and purchase a copy of the Terminator and want to watch it on my computer, should I not be able to, just becuase it's encrypted? Of course not. I should be able to watch it on my pc, rip it to DivX to keep a smaller copy on my computer for play on my xbox/playstation2. This is a moral breaking of an unjust law, and it's legality is irrelevant. Same goes for iTunes, they sell you crippled files you own the crippled files, it's within your right to uncripple them. It _used_ to be within your rights of fair use to make copies of music and mix tapes and give them friends free of charge, however the current RIAA/MPAA friendly administration is helping to erode those rights, thanks Orrin!!!
i dont hold the president accountable or responsible for the state of the economy. In fact, if the president is accountable or responsible we have a corrupt system. I think most people here are technology workers, and i'm not sure how well you remember the tech economy 4 years ago, but it got pretty crappy and lots of people here lost their jobs, and now its doing better.
now i don't get how i thought it made sense, what was the substition in axis that made a steep learning curve something hard to learn? I suppose it's the imagining of riding a bike on the curves of a 2d graph and steep sure sounds harder than a nice gradual curve...
I can't wait to beat someone with my new knowledge tomorrow! thanks!
The first part, act as one big SMP machine is what clustering does.
The second part with shell acounts and home directories are all problems already solved by NIS/NFS. You could setup a pool of machines that all share the same NIS/NFS info so anywhere the user logged in they'd have the same files/passwords, and load balance it via ipvs or dns.
AFAIK the current state of clustering works well for custom code situations, where you write your app to run on the cluster, but doesn't transparently make your 4 boxes act like 1 box with 4X the resources for just any program.
I've used distcc with some luck on gentoo, but it only distributes compiling over your nodes.
Could we cut down on these stories, I, for one, want rapidly rising ocean levels to be a surprise to our coastal residents, and articles like this are giving them far too much warning.
Just because something is changing from the way you found it doesn't mean it is worse. We live on a dynamic, changing, planet, get used to it. And we are part of it and part of what changes it. We need to bend nature to our will, for our own good, and not try to patch things that are broken. Let the freakin spotted owl go extinct!
You're *stealing*, just becuase you hate the people you *steal* from doesn't mean it's somehow ok. I mean, I could understand a moral stretch if you were starving while some rich guy was throwing away tons of food and you stole some of his food.
But computer software? Sorry man, you should care because you should have a conscience and know that stealing is wrong.
I'm all for suing people justly, but this guy is filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of all purchasers of xbox's s
quote from the description
"The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, seeks to represent anyone who bought an Xbox in the United State since the console's November 2001 launch."
Maybe you should RTFA, this was a short one, so it shouldn't have been too difficult.
It is short on details, but I can't see how if you purchased an Xbox, it busted before the warranty was up, why you didn't just take it back. Do these only have a 90 day warranty? Maybe you shouldn't buy one if you don't like what they're selling.
people make the bridge from the Internet to the private banking networks.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94425
http://www.ladlass.com/archives/000794.html
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS6438545389.html
Slashdot Mirror
A, um.. friend of mine, has downloaded probably a dozen movies off the Internet. He's bought 4 movies on DVD at full retail from Best Buy as a result of seeing these movies and wanting to have a DVD quality copy/support the makers/etc. Of the other 8 or so about half were bad movies, and he did not buy DVD's. The other half he only downloaded because they were still in theaters, and hollywood's idiotic policy means you can't watch it at home for months after the initial release, so he bought the DVD's once they were out. For example, he had the first 2 lord of the rings on full quality DVD almost a year before the actual DVD was out. These movies he saw in the theater more than once each, and has purchased both the normal versions and extended.
Again, him pirating movies has led to more purchases, and therefore more revenue for the MPAA.
Show me a court case where this has happened and I'll tell people to worry.
I'd wager that a jury won't agree with your lawyers slicing of the hair. When you connect to Steam, do you not "agree" to a license to use it? When you start downloading an app on a .torrent you have no license. You are violating the copyright holders claim to have a license. But if they are party to, and/or facilitate you in getting a copy of their copyrighted work(s), all bets are off.
Also, Your DVD has a nice little part that says something like this is authorized only for private viewings, no distribution, etc. So, if, the copyright holder gave me a special DVD that had a notice saying I could copy it and sell it, then I could. It's all civil issues, or was, until the MPAA/RIAA bought the government.
Now, I'm not advocating piracy, I have many times in the past defended anti-piracy acts, and I think piracy hurts the things I use like Linux. But I think your lawyer friend is one of many lawyers, and if they all agreed on anything then we wouldn't have court now would we.
These things (i600s) simply do not work as advertised. Verizon is lying on their page that says product info. For instance, they claim 240 hours of standby battery time with the default battery. Now, Windows 2003 upgrade has doubled battery performance, where I can almost get 1 full day (24 hours) STANDBY time on my i600 with the normal battery, this is with 0 use. They do include a double size battery that you can actually use for 1 morning-night period of normal use, but heavy use? forget it with these. One of the people at work had one and went hunting, kept the extended battery connected but the phone OFF for the friday night-sunday afternoon time frame, and the battery was DEAD when he got back. So, if you used BOTH batterys, and the phone was OFF the entire time, you would NOT get the 240 hours "STANDBY" time that Verizon claims on their page.
Next problem is basically a BSOD on these things, The same guy who took his hunting just got his replaced with a brand new one from Samsung because he couldn't make calls. Now he can't RECEIVE calls. If you call his phone it crashes. The interior display goes black, and the exterior LCD says "missed call".. We had 11 of these phones, and every single one was junk, was quirky, did NOT perform anywhere near as advertised.
The data sync.. forget about it. One day you get emails with only a 20-30 minute delay, next day no emails come to your phone, next day you get duplicates of the same emails you got the first day, but still none from the second day...
Anyways, I'll wait for the class action, in the meantime, DO NOT BUY Samsung i600's with Windows on them, they are total garbage...
Oh, if you want to ignore me, I still have 9 of them for sale $300 each, gently used.
Buy 2 good load balancers with redundant power supplies, SCSI disks with hardware RAID. Depending on how much database your app needs that's where your hardest to avoid point of failure will be, look into what slashdot does for high performance, I forget the name of the software but it's a distributed caching type system, linux journal had an article about it and it looked very interesting.
Also, find out how much load you need to support, high traffic means a lot of different things different people. Use siege to slam your setup once you think its good. Make charts and graphs of the data, you won't really understand the data until you try to process it into something that you can explain to someone else.
When it comes down to it your biggest bottleneck will often be your pipe. 2 fast ipvs load balancers, 10 web servers, and 2 big database servers could easily handle more than the 1 ethernet connection your isp provides if you're hosting moderate database sites.
Also, it's very your database performance is going to be the killer once you go into production, design your schema very well, and test it extensively. monitor all your queries which ones cost the most, and optimize them. Have a test AND a stage environment similar if not identical to your production one, and USE IT!
Make sure you know how to use all your tools, there's nothing like trying to search through man pages while your site is down. Make sure you have redundancy in personel, whether all on staff, or consultants. Make schedules and let people know who is responsible.
Oh, and monitor it like crazy, from at least 2 differnet sites that can page you 24x7, and don't ignore your pager at 3am just cuz you're asleep.
Also, make backups like crazy, the largest percentage of your disk and storage in general should be used by backups! Test restores of your backups on your test environment.
One final thing then I'll go, don't be afraid of buying things on eBay. Redundancy is worth more than speed when you're in a 24x7 environment. I really like to buy 3 year old servers and fibre disk arrays there for 1/10th the cost new. These were $30k servers 3-4 years ago, now going for $200-800, they have 3 redundant power supplies, hardware RAID controllers, multiple PCI buses, quad processors, 1-4GB ram, and run great. Also the SAN market on eBay is very saturated with sellers, and you can ignore anything that's close to retail price. I've seen 10x36GB disk fibre arrays with full dual redundant power supplies and controllers for $199 buy it now, and not broken crappy ones. I've got a 10x18GB one, software RAID 0 under Linux I get 95MB/sec sustained (20GB files) reads and writes. (In Windows 2000 server and Windows XP I get about 35MB/sec doing the similar software RAID 0, this is one of many reasons you should ALREADY know not to try to use windows in a production environement on the web)
I'm envious, I love setting stuff like that up! It's my favorite thing to do in IT!!
Whew, have a good day.
You CAN fast forward and rewind with the latest version.
It WAS usable to play some divx/mpg and all mp3/ogg and jpg's on your tv.
A modded Xbox kills it in every way now, and the company no longer supports/develops it as far as I can tell from their forums (broadq.com).
It is slow loading, you can't turn of ps2 remotely, the playlist interface I don't find really bad, it's more analagous to a gaming interface than to a remote, which seems to fit it being on a ps2 and controlled using a gamepad.
I'd go for a modded Xbox, throw in a 200GB drive and a mod chip for about $130-150 more than the used xbox for $99 ish, put all your crap on it, boots up pretty fast, can have component out, can play real xbox games, or just have all your mp3's/video/pictures on your xbox, accessable over ftp... that's what I'm getting for xmas
sorry but a non free email alternative is not an alternative to a free email. If gmail/hotmail/yahoo/whoever charged money for the account I wouldn't have 15 email accounts.
Second, you're talking about key generators, cracked security keys, etc, largely used for piracy. Most open source advocated are NOT pirates of music or software. And, many would argue that software piracy greatly hurts the value of open source software since people don't realize the true cost of the software they pirate. This is not a motivation for typical open source advocates to crack things.
Third, you're talking about fairly using something that someone has attempted to unfairly restrict your use of. This is where iTunes and deCSS fall under. If I go to Best Buy and purchase a copy of the Terminator and want to watch it on my computer, should I not be able to, just becuase it's encrypted? Of course not. I should be able to watch it on my pc, rip it to DivX to keep a smaller copy on my computer for play on my xbox/playstation2. This is a moral breaking of an unjust law, and it's legality is irrelevant. Same goes for iTunes, they sell you crippled files you own the crippled files, it's within your right to uncripple them. It _used_ to be within your rights of fair use to make copies of music and mix tapes and give them friends free of charge, however the current RIAA/MPAA friendly administration is helping to erode those rights, thanks Orrin!!!
It's called EUROPE.
We don't need every country in the world to devolve into a social welfare state.
Say "Baaa" for mr. president
I can't wait to beat someone with my new knowledge tomorrow! thanks!
The second part with shell acounts and home directories are all problems already solved by NIS/NFS. You could setup a pool of machines that all share the same NIS/NFS info so anywhere the user logged in they'd have the same files/passwords, and load balance it via ipvs or dns.
AFAIK the current state of clustering works well for custom code situations, where you write your app to run on the cluster, but doesn't transparently make your 4 boxes act like 1 box with 4X the resources for just any program.
I've used distcc with some luck on gentoo, but it only distributes compiling over your nodes.
Just because something is changing from the way you found it doesn't mean it is worse. We live on a dynamic, changing, planet, get used to it. And we are part of it and part of what changes it. We need to bend nature to our will, for our own good, and not try to patch things that are broken. Let the freakin spotted owl go extinct!
But computer software? Sorry man, you should care because you should have a conscience and know that stealing is wrong.
I would prefer ads and corporate sponsorship to government sponsored misinformation any day...
whew! barely made it..
I'm all for suing people justly, but this guy is filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of all purchasers of xbox's s quote from the description
"The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, seeks to represent anyone who bought an Xbox in the United State since the console's November 2001 launch."
Maybe you should RTFA, this was a short one, so it shouldn't have been too difficult.
It is short on details, but I can't see how if you purchased an Xbox, it busted before the warranty was up, why you didn't just take it back. Do these only have a 90 day warranty? Maybe you shouldn't buy one if you don't like what they're selling.