Well this is an American company. They are displacing AMERICAN workers.
I don't appreciate your "rascist" statement. While I don't think americans are better than the indians, I don't give a DAMN about the indians trying to come into this country to offset our jobs. I happen to be unemployed. If they want better conditions in their country, then they should bleed in the streets and go on strike like the americans did. Don't come over here and bring us back to those days. Corporations are being given back all this power, and no good will come of it. By doing this, the wealth is redistributed from the middle and lower classes into the CEO and boardmembers pockets, along with a little for the shareholders.
2,500 substandard employees??? (or whatever the quoted number was)
I could understand 50, maybe 200 substandard employees, but this is sheer genocide of their workforce. They are most certainly excising the higher paid americans to go with lower paid H1-B's. Why else have all these barriers to the american workers?
Don't be a fool. Just taking Sun's "substandard employees" comment at face value is ignorant.
I dont' want to get into an arguement, so Im replying to your comment instead;) In spite of what people say, every year, we discover more and more oil. We used to think we only had 100 years worth at current consumption in the 70s. Now we know there are many times that amount. I grew up in an oil family. Its amazing how little the average person actually knows about energy. Whats more amazing is the FUD that tree huggers put out, even knowing better. The truth doesn't matter to these people: Only their agenda does.
Who let George dubya onto Slashdot?
It's very easy for you to dismiss people as tree huggers. "Those are the crazies, you don't have to listen to them" Just like those silly hippies and their peace talk when we should be bombing the shit out of Iraq!
</TESTOSTERONE>
Ok, so you think we will just magically continue to find oil in the ground? You can only get so much oil out of the ground before all the volume of the Earth's crust is empty oil wells. We can only dig so far before the benefit we get out of that oil is outweighed by the technology required just to get it out of the ground.
Even if we DO manage to find more oil, it is obvious to ME that foreign dependence is getting us into a lot of trouble. These people have us by the balls. We are supporting naughty regimes just to keep driving our oil consumption. Saudi Arabia. Most oil reserves in the world, right? They hate us. Not the government, the people.
Consider also, the drop in costs for the labels. All they will need to pay for is studio time and the like... All those CD's that people now are not buying, you don't have the expense of distribution and packaging you do now. You aren't even paying for pressing the CD! This would cut their expenses immensely, which could make the relatively small revenue of this plan work. Granted, they will still be producing traditional CD's for those who dont' buy into this service, but they wouldn't be producing as many.
Studio time yes, but what are you cutting out of this? Cover art, distribution, what am I missing? Distribution of CD's shouldn't be very expensive. Think of the bandwidth problem: at some point, it becomes cheaper and faster to throw something on a 9 gig DAT tape and mail it 1st class than it does to send it over the internet. Now, granted, you are now compressing those 800MB/80 minute discs into MP3's, so you don't have to send as much down the line, but no one except the record companies is going to be able to determine which becomes cheaper. I'll agree that distribution costs are a factor, but think of it as an economy of scale. If you are sending like 200 lbs/kilos/whatever of CD's to a Best Buy down the road, what are the bandwidth costs to send those 200 lbs/kilos/whatever of CD's over the internet?
What about limitations? It seems the recording industry is DEAD set against giving anything away (selling or otherwise) without protection in place. I personally am going to reject any copy protected (read: crippled) media. Why release this stuff for free on someone's CPU-fer-files P2P when it can just end up on Kazaa/Gnutella/WinMX/Freenet/blah blah blah etc etc ad nausseum? I think the cat is already out of the bag. P2P isn't going anywhere without totally crippling the internet, which IMO will destroy ISP's. Not that they won't have any business at all, but they will have a LOT LESS business.
That's as far as revenue goes. Profit is not nearly that much. (I'd guess the retailer alone takes ~40%) With these costs shaved off, people will probably buy more music, perhaps generating more profit from less revenue. CPU cycles may still be too cheap, but you haven't proven it.
True, but that just reinforces my argument, that they would not recoup enough on this. Your argument that this will generate more profit doesn't necessarily catch either. If this is available for free (especially since they are proposing this be legal file trading, liscensed by the big 4 or whatever), then there AREN'T profits generated from people downloading, but from researchers paying for CPU time. That doesn't mean they will buy more, any more than "every file downloaded is a CD sale lost". BTW, I didn't mean to propogate that argument. And I certainly take offense to the Hillary Rosen comparison:)
There is no magic program to make crap sound like gold. Post processing is done fine on desktop machines. IANAPP (post processor:) but I would imagine with a nice desktop or maybe a handful (armful? roomful?) they have all the power they need for post-processing. If you have to have an entire distributed-net for post processing to fix your crappy music, maybe it is time to fire your scouts, and get new talent.
I highly doubt this will be a viable revenue stream for the music industries. Think about how much they get for an average CD as far as profit goes. Now compare that to your average MP3 downloader. Computer processing power is cheap. If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold. Over the course of a year, you are seeing $180-$240 given out in free downloads (that is the album cost @ 1 album/month). You may as well just BUY a board and chip and case for that price and network it locally. You can get a middle of the road AMD or Intel processor and board for that cost, and possibly fit in the case cost. If it has onboard lan, just pop some memory in and you're good to go. Use network booting, maybe a MOSIX cluster or something.
Don't forget to add in the salaries of all the people who have to run this "P2P for cycles" system. Development costs. Administration. Those are people that could just be running the purchased cluster, instead of trying to milk P2P somehow. I think this is just a shot in the dark. Or a conspiracy to fingerprint downloads, as someone else mentioned.
Offtopic, but I have a board in my closet that used to be my main machine a while back. It had 3 32meg DIMM's in it. If I pulled any one of them, Win2k would blue screen. I couldn't take any ONE of them out and replace it, or it would blue screen on boot. Strangest thing.
the 2.4 kernel CRASHES. Sorry, I'm bitter. It doesn't work well on my Alpha box. Too much focus on x86. Someone else has problems on a Max Performa.
Oh, and are you STARK RAVING LOONY? "Grandma, go recompile your kernel, you need support for vfat and the EMU10K1, make it all modularized, and don't forget the patches" Grandma: "You lost me at recompile"
Whatever. Recompiling a kernel, while simple to someone with a basic understanding of compilers, isn't what I consider "basics of maintaining these systems". Grandma wants email. Grandma may want some web access. Grandma doesn't care about O(1) schedulers or other nifty features of 2.4
Because until recently, I couldn't find a patch for SMP on alpha machines. Since my server is a dual alpha, I can't go 2.4. In the last 2 months or so I managed to find a patch to fix the SMP issues (still isn't in the main kernel tree). I'm STILL having major pains getting 2.4 to work, this time it is problems with the raid5 module. It complains about a lack of some xor.o module, and I can't find that anywhere. Not going to switch unless I can get to my raid5 volumes.
In conclusion, platform support aside from x86 isn't that great.
As for my x86 machine, it works fine NOW, but back around 2.4.13 or so it was having problems with crashes.
You have made a statement that makes it very clear you are a very educated layman, not someone in the field. What you've said is true to the first order, but not inherantly true.
There are a lot of peeps complaining about substandard ram. If you had RTFA, you'd realize that the downgrade ram is reconfigured to skip the bad parts in the chips, so that it comes out as a normal module. Just because there is a faulty bit or 10 in a modules, doesn't mean the reast of that module is bound to fail. It could just have been an imperfection in the silicon or the circuit process.
The downgrade ram has to pass further tests to insure the detours around the bad parts worked.
Granted, I probably wouldn't use this stuff in a mission critical server, but if you are buying for a mission critical server, you should be getting ECC registered with lifetime warranties anyway. Now for a small web or file server, or even a desktop, I'd use this.
Other people have mentioned memtest86. This program is your friend. Don't even bother with BIOS POST tests of RAM, just use this every once in a while if you REALLY want to find the problems. Too bad it won't run on my alpha server:(
I'm glad someone is stepping up and saying this, though I doubt anyone will listen.
The name of the game is scarcity. It is VERY important to advertising and gaming. If someone is going to dedicate between 5 and 40 hours of their week to playing a game, how are they going to play other games? I don't think there is NEARLY the market for MMOG's as there is for single player games with small multiplayer capabilities.
If you are going to make an MMOG, it better be DAMN good, or you aren't going to retain any customers.
An MMOG isn't anything like a single player game. I can go back and play Final Fantasy 7 or Zelda Ocarina of Time anytime I want, but what happens when a publishing company doesn't feel it is making enough money off a game? ZIIIIP! That was the sound of the ethernet/fiber being pulled on the server. Now you can't play it. Worthless. You just spent $10 a month for the last 2 years on a game that is now gone. $240 vs a one time fee of $40. No contest to me.
Actually, you still can hear inflection/tone in the dialog in japanese, and associate that along with the subs while you read.
I happen to like subs over dubs because I find american cartoons always have cheesy accents which take away from the seriousness. Now, I figure that the japanese is just like this, if I could actually understand japanese, but I can't, so the cheesiness is lost on me.
Some people are very very anal about this (otaku fanboys/girls). I'll always take a sub over a dub if it is available, otherwise I'll settle. Also, I find it's easier to eat food and listen to a dub than eat and try to read subs at the same time:)
The gnutella developers need to get their asses in gear and rename what they were developing Gnutella3. And continue to publicly shun Shareaza. And pick apart it's implementation.
I think shareaza has a right to make improvements to the software, but I don't think they have any right to take the gnutella2 name.
I use metal brackets like that to hold my 3 old full-height (3" tall!) 5.25" narrow SCSI drives. I don't have a case with 6 normal drive bays to hold them in, so they have to sit outside the case. Yeah, I know they are old, and I know there is cheaper stuff out, but I got them cheap, and it's a non-trivial extra 27 gigs.
They are damn near indestructable. The things are already like 7 years old. See if this guy can say that about his puny (physically) 1-year-warranty IDE drives:)
I wonder how he keeps them from collapsing? I don't see any crossbars on that mod. He should build a sort of chimney of out wood with some intake fans at the bottom. That way the drives aren't so exposed.
A friend of mine had an old parallel port Iomega ZIP drive (the 100 meg models) in his van when he was driving on the highway. Well, he got into an accident. Someone rear ended him, crushing the back end of his van. His Computer was back there, and got scrunched, and the zip drive flew out the window at highway speeds. The computer managed to survive because the side of the case facing the wreck was the open side (the motherboard almost got crunched by the other side though)
The zip drive he gave to me in like 5 pieces. The bottom shell and top shell of plastic, and the circuit board wit the drive rails. The rails were bent, but after some coaxing I managed to bend them back in shape (they are plastic) and fit the case back together. It is missing the front panel (with the little spring loaded door and the LED light pipes and the bush button eject), but other than that it works fine. The Iomega drives use a soft eject system anyway, and the circuit board is undamaged. Missing some springs though, but it still manages to eject.
I don't think this is relevant. I haven't looked at any packets going down the wire, but I'm assuming when you request a file from another user, you have to ask for that file. Filename request goes down the wire. Once you know the format of file requests for a given P2P program, you can just scan them to see what kinds of files people are requesting. If not the file requests, what about when the client replies to search requests? What about direct connect complete listing queries?
Some users have already brought this up, but the way around this is to encrypt/re-code the traffic. That is, all the requests, all the listings, all the control stuff, and the file transfer itself. This may lead to an increase in bandwidth consumption just to encrypt everything though:) So in an effort to make things better, once the P2P catches on it will be made worse again.
Just like after Napster. When Napster was popular, there was a gradual movement to shut down access to it. So other services started popping up, then completely distributed services such as Gnutella. Gnutella is a tremendous bandwidth hog, as opposed to something more centralized.
I respect the universities that just try to limit the bandwidth consumption of the offenders. But just shutting this stuff down cold turkey is only going to lead to P2P more difficult to detect and filter.
Of course, organizations such as the shitty Adelphia cable should not BY DEFAULT have a 15kps upstream. Assholes.
No, I'm arguing with you, and it seems you have given up, because you have not replied to any of my points this time around, and while yes, I did insult you, I offered an argument with valid points. You have just offered insults.
What drug remarks? "What are you smoking" is a legitimate reply to an odd assumption or assertion. You sound a little paranoid, afraid of admitting something? (is that direct enough for you?)
Oops, I forgot to specify. Yes, I mean the upstream. The downstream is much faster. I have no complaints about the downstreams. Those numbers are both upstream ratings.
And that is kilobytes (B, not b) so it is still faster than a modem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well this is an American company. They are displacing AMERICAN workers.
I don't appreciate your "rascist" statement. While I don't think americans are better than the indians, I don't give a DAMN about the indians trying to come into this country to offset our jobs. I happen to be unemployed. If they want better conditions in their country, then they should bleed in the streets and go on strike like the americans did. Don't come over here and bring us back to those days. Corporations are being given back all this power, and no good will come of it. By doing this, the wealth is redistributed from the middle and lower classes into the CEO and boardmembers pockets, along with a little for the shareholders.
2,500 substandard employees??? (or whatever the quoted number was)
I could understand 50, maybe 200 substandard employees, but this is sheer genocide of their workforce. They are most certainly excising the higher paid americans to go with lower paid H1-B's. Why else have all these barriers to the american workers?
Don't be a fool. Just taking Sun's "substandard employees" comment at face value is ignorant.
Who let George dubya onto Slashdot?
It's very easy for you to dismiss people as tree huggers. "Those are the crazies, you don't have to listen to them" Just like those silly hippies and their peace talk when we should be bombing the shit out of Iraq! Ok, so you think we will just magically continue to find oil in the ground? You can only get so much oil out of the ground before all the volume of the Earth's crust is empty oil wells. We can only dig so far before the benefit we get out of that oil is outweighed by the technology required just to get it out of the ground.
Even if we DO manage to find more oil, it is obvious to ME that foreign dependence is getting us into a lot of trouble. These people have us by the balls. We are supporting naughty regimes just to keep driving our oil consumption. Saudi Arabia. Most oil reserves in the world, right? They hate us. Not the government, the people.
What about limitations? It seems the recording industry is DEAD set against giving anything away (selling or otherwise) without protection in place. I personally am going to reject any copy protected (read: crippled) media. Why release this stuff for free on someone's CPU-fer-files P2P when it can just end up on Kazaa/Gnutella/WinMX/Freenet/blah blah blah etc etc ad nausseum? I think the cat is already out of the bag. P2P isn't going anywhere without totally crippling the internet, which IMO will destroy ISP's. Not that they won't have any business at all, but they will have a LOT LESS business.
There is no magic program to make crap sound like gold. Post processing is done fine on desktop machines. IANAPP (post processor :) but I would imagine with a nice desktop or maybe a handful (armful? roomful?) they have all the power they need for post-processing. If you have to have an entire distributed-net for post processing to fix your crappy music, maybe it is time to fire your scouts, and get new talent.
I highly doubt this will be a viable revenue stream for the music industries. Think about how much they get for an average CD as far as profit goes. Now compare that to your average MP3 downloader. Computer processing power is cheap. If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold. Over the course of a year, you are seeing $180-$240 given out in free downloads (that is the album cost @ 1 album/month). You may as well just BUY a board and chip and case for that price and network it locally. You can get a middle of the road AMD or Intel processor and board for that cost, and possibly fit in the case cost. If it has onboard lan, just pop some memory in and you're good to go. Use network booting, maybe a MOSIX cluster or something.
Don't forget to add in the salaries of all the people who have to run this "P2P for cycles" system. Development costs. Administration. Those are people that could just be running the purchased cluster, instead of trying to milk P2P somehow. I think this is just a shot in the dark. Or a conspiracy to fingerprint downloads, as someone else mentioned.
Offtopic, but I have a board in my closet that used to be my main machine a while back. It had 3 32meg DIMM's in it. If I pulled any one of them, Win2k would blue screen. I couldn't take any ONE of them out and replace it, or it would blue screen on boot. Strangest thing.
Like the Software Raid FAQ says:
Question 13)
Answer:
Question 14) Why is there no question 13?
Answer: If you are into system administration, it pays to be a little paranoid. Can't hurt right?
That's paraphrased, I was too lazy to go copy and paste.
the 2.4 kernel CRASHES. Sorry, I'm bitter. It doesn't work well on my Alpha box. Too much focus on x86. Someone else has problems on a Max Performa.
Oh, and are you STARK RAVING LOONY? "Grandma, go recompile your kernel, you need support for vfat and the EMU10K1, make it all modularized, and don't forget the patches" Grandma: "You lost me at recompile"
Whatever. Recompiling a kernel, while simple to someone with a basic understanding of compilers, isn't what I consider "basics of maintaining these systems". Grandma wants email. Grandma may want some web access. Grandma doesn't care about O(1) schedulers or other nifty features of 2.4
Because until recently, I couldn't find a patch for SMP on alpha machines. Since my server is a dual alpha, I can't go 2.4. In the last 2 months or so I managed to find a patch to fix the SMP issues (still isn't in the main kernel tree). I'm STILL having major pains getting 2.4 to work, this time it is problems with the raid5 module. It complains about a lack of some xor.o module, and I can't find that anywhere. Not going to switch unless I can get to my raid5 volumes.
In conclusion, platform support aside from x86 isn't that great.
As for my x86 machine, it works fine NOW, but back around 2.4.13 or so it was having problems with crashes.
I've just had SO much more luck with 2.2
You have made a statement that makes it very clear you are a very educated layman, not someone in the field. What you've said is true to the first order, but not inherantly true.
:)
You caught me
There are a lot of peeps complaining about substandard ram. If you had RTFA, you'd realize that the downgrade ram is reconfigured to skip the bad parts in the chips, so that it comes out as a normal module. Just because there is a faulty bit or 10 in a modules, doesn't mean the reast of that module is bound to fail. It could just have been an imperfection in the silicon or the circuit process.
:(
The downgrade ram has to pass further tests to insure the detours around the bad parts worked.
Granted, I probably wouldn't use this stuff in a mission critical server, but if you are buying for a mission critical server, you should be getting ECC registered with lifetime warranties anyway. Now for a small web or file server, or even a desktop, I'd use this.
Other people have mentioned memtest86. This program is your friend. Don't even bother with BIOS POST tests of RAM, just use this every once in a while if you REALLY want to find the problems. Too bad it won't run on my alpha server
I've been waiting for the computer graveyard market to ramp up. Where does the rest of defective computer systems go?
It's in my closet. All of it. The whole market. I'm waiting for the entire tech market to crash, so I can flood the market.
if it didn't pass quality standards, then how else would they figure out which ones are defective?
I'm glad someone is stepping up and saying this, though I doubt anyone will listen.
The name of the game is scarcity. It is VERY important to advertising and gaming. If someone is going to dedicate between 5 and 40 hours of their week to playing a game, how are they going to play other games? I don't think there is NEARLY the market for MMOG's as there is for single player games with small multiplayer capabilities.
If you are going to make an MMOG, it better be DAMN good, or you aren't going to retain any customers.
An MMOG isn't anything like a single player game. I can go back and play Final Fantasy 7 or Zelda Ocarina of Time anytime I want, but what happens when a publishing company doesn't feel it is making enough money off a game? ZIIIIP! That was the sound of the ethernet/fiber being pulled on the server. Now you can't play it. Worthless. You just spent $10 a month for the last 2 years on a game that is now gone. $240 vs a one time fee of $40. No contest to me.
Actually, you still can hear inflection/tone in the dialog in japanese, and associate that along with the subs while you read.
:)
I happen to like subs over dubs because I find american cartoons always have cheesy accents which take away from the seriousness. Now, I figure that the japanese is just like this, if I could actually understand japanese, but I can't, so the cheesiness is lost on me.
Some people are very very anal about this (otaku fanboys/girls). I'll always take a sub over a dub if it is available, otherwise I'll settle. Also, I find it's easier to eat food and listen to a dub than eat and try to read subs at the same time
Or does that article read like a horoscope?
"Avoid tech stocks for the next 6-8 years due to the alignment of Venus and Jupiter and Lucent's retarded business decisions"
The gnutella developers need to get their asses in gear and rename what they were developing Gnutella3. And continue to publicly shun Shareaza. And pick apart it's implementation.
I think shareaza has a right to make improvements to the software, but I don't think they have any right to take the gnutella2 name.
I use metal brackets like that to hold my 3 old full-height (3" tall!) 5.25" narrow SCSI drives. I don't have a case with 6 normal drive bays to hold them in, so they have to sit outside the case. Yeah, I know they are old, and I know there is cheaper stuff out, but I got them cheap, and it's a non-trivial extra 27 gigs.
:)
They are damn near indestructable. The things are already like 7 years old. See if this guy can say that about his puny (physically) 1-year-warranty IDE drives
I wonder how he keeps them from collapsing? I don't see any crossbars on that mod. He should build a sort of chimney of out wood with some intake fans at the bottom. That way the drives aren't so exposed.
A friend of mine had an old parallel port Iomega ZIP drive (the 100 meg models) in his van when he was driving on the highway. Well, he got into an accident. Someone rear ended him, crushing the back end of his van. His Computer was back there, and got scrunched, and the zip drive flew out the window at highway speeds. The computer managed to survive because the side of the case facing the wreck was the open side (the motherboard almost got crunched by the other side though)
The zip drive he gave to me in like 5 pieces. The bottom shell and top shell of plastic, and the circuit board wit the drive rails. The rails were bent, but after some coaxing I managed to bend them back in shape (they are plastic) and fit the case back together. It is missing the front panel (with the little spring loaded door and the LED light pipes and the bush button eject), but other than that it works fine. The Iomega drives use a soft eject system anyway, and the circuit board is undamaged. Missing some springs though, but it still manages to eject.
The computer generates the song for you.
Gotta love the record industry. It really just gets more and more obvious that they are digging their own graves.
I don't think this is relevant. I haven't looked at any packets going down the wire, but I'm assuming when you request a file from another user, you have to ask for that file. Filename request goes down the wire. Once you know the format of file requests for a given P2P program, you can just scan them to see what kinds of files people are requesting. If not the file requests, what about when the client replies to search requests? What about direct connect complete listing queries?
:) So in an effort to make things better, once the P2P catches on it will be made worse again.
Some users have already brought this up, but the way around this is to encrypt/re-code the traffic. That is, all the requests, all the listings, all the control stuff, and the file transfer itself. This may lead to an increase in bandwidth consumption just to encrypt everything though
Just like after Napster. When Napster was popular, there was a gradual movement to shut down access to it. So other services started popping up, then completely distributed services such as Gnutella. Gnutella is a tremendous bandwidth hog, as opposed to something more centralized.
I respect the universities that just try to limit the bandwidth consumption of the offenders. But just shutting this stuff down cold turkey is only going to lead to P2P more difficult to detect and filter.
Of course, organizations such as the shitty Adelphia cable should not BY DEFAULT have a 15kps upstream. Assholes.
No, I'm arguing with you, and it seems you have given up, because you have not replied to any of my points this time around, and while yes, I did insult you, I offered an argument with valid points. You have just offered insults.
What drug remarks? "What are you smoking" is a legitimate reply to an odd assumption or assertion. You sound a little paranoid, afraid of admitting something? (is that direct enough for you?)
Oops, I forgot to specify. Yes, I mean the upstream. The downstream is much faster. I have no complaints about the downstreams. Those numbers are both upstream ratings.
And that is kilobytes (B, not b) so it is still faster than a modem.