Most traditional newspapers have fact checking departments and rules that information must be vouched for by two independent sources. Drudge doesn't do all that stuff, so in some ways he's a bit more vulnerable to hoaxing.
Since he's broken enough news that turned out to be true (thanks to getting on the 'A' list for leaks seeking wide distribution), he has enough credibility to turn out OK. And the traditional guys don't always do the fact checking they should, or in the case like this, they can report the fact that "Drudge is reporting that Two Towers has been leaked" which is of course 100% true.
Plus as you say, it sells more papers. In any case, the old adage holds: don't believe everything you read.
Yeah, that webpage is a great explanation of dipoles and van der Waals forces. What I don't get is how the dipole interaction changes when the 'hair' is at a different angle (which is, as I understand it, how the Gecko 'unsticks' his leg, by changing the angle of his leg as other posters here have pointed out.)
Whether MySQL or Postgres, I don't care as long as open source ends up being a platform for databases. Microsoft can try to portray Linux as a niche webserver platform now, but with a solid foothold as a database platform, open software, as a platform, will be substantially harder to dislodge.
Harganon who has worked his ass off for 40 years to try and get not only the brightest but also the most interesting and able students no matter what their background has been forced out of a job which has basicly been his whole life for a long time.
One minor correction: Hargadon wasn't really forced out over this. I believe he had publicly said (well before the incident) that he was retiring and it was time to look for a successor. He bears some responsibility since A) the buck stops at him, and B) he was notified of the situation and didn't stop it, but in my mind, he's not nearly as culpable because he is (to the best of my knowledge) old and fairly computer clueless; he's really more of a sports guy. (A major hallmark of his career at Princeton was prioritizing the number of and quality of jocks on campus to create many highly successful and NCAA championship sports teams.) Did he really understand what was going on? I doubt it. He never participated directly, and he's on the way out anyway. It's a minor blemish at the end of a distinguished career.
Now for Mr. LeMenager, it's a major disaster. As a potential successor to Hargadon (I presume, reading a bit between the lines here), he showed very poor judgement thrice: once when entering Yale's website with some other student's SSN, a second time when he shared that knowledge with other staffers without telling people it'd be wrong, and third, by trying to excuse his behavior with the oldest, dumbest excuse in the book, "I was testing someone else's security!" (note: without their permission).
Mr. LeMenager clearly knew that accessing a site with SSNs was, in theory, wrong, since the whole point of logging in was to show to Yale that something everyone agreed was "wrong", was in fact way too easy to do. If you had interviewed Mr. LeMenager a year ago and asked him if a Harvard admissions officer logged onto Princeton's network and grabbed admissions data and said he was just "testing Princeton's security" would LeMenager have said that was OK? Somehow, I doubt it.
Was it a hack? If hack implies skill, then no. Was it malicious? Probably not. Was it unethical? Absolutely.
Unfortunately, LeMenager knew just enough to be dangerous (hey, I can use SSNs) to himself, and not enough to protect himself (oops, all these accesses can be logged by IP address). In his eagerness to prove someone else (Yale) wrong or stupid, he made a number of wrong and stupid things himself.
I think Tilghman comes out smelling like a rose in one of the first crises of her administration; the punishments described seem exactly right for all involved from my subjective perspective. For such unethical and stupid actions from such a post of responsibility, and for making the whole university look bad and shady, LeMenager should have been fired, but since he's been such a good employee for 20 years and his actions weren't really malicious per se, he's given the benefit of the doubt and shuffled somewhere else. Assuming he really liked admissions work, he can gracefully take the hint and leave when he gets an offer elsewhere. After all, what he did isn't *that* bad. Or if he really loves Princeton, he can contribute somewhere else where his ethical lapse won't be relevant to ongoing assessments of his performance. Other admissions employees who used applicant's SSNs and should have known better get disciplined, Hargadon issues a public apology and accepts ultimate responsibility. And Tilghman succeeded doing the key things that were necessary to resolve the situation quickly and appropriately, making it a top priority to A) apologize to the Yale applicants who were affected, personally, and check for ongoing grievances related to the incident, B) figured out how to get a fairly independent investigation conducted so she'd have the right facts, and C) asserted the proper ethical expectations of all involved (none of this "we were testing their security" crap), without hiding details or excusing bad behavior.
Yawn, read the thread before you flame. The parent post to mine mentioned websites for half a dozen other *gas-powered* flying devices besides the Draganflier (whose website I *did* read and whose limitations prompted my question), and that post's author asked if anyone had any questions about the field in general.
Can any of these A) be controlled by your PC in some manner so that I could control their direction with computer, B) have videocamera attachments with input that thus could be read by computer, and C) stay up in the air for 15 minutes?
It's a marvelous device. The one thing I was really bummed about was that it only went 5 minutes on battery. That's a pretty big limitation if you think about it. Even 15 minutes would be a heck of a lot better.
And the robotics professor who tried controlling it by computer really only got it to fly up 15 centimeters and land without help. That was a bit disappointing, as I'd love to work on programming one of these puppies.
This may not be the definitive answer to the question, "Why Andersen, but not KPMG/PWC/E&Y/C&L?", that you raise in point #3, but to me, it's a darn good one:
All auditing companies have an internal review panel for reviewing auditing practices when questions arise, right? But when a client wanted to stretch the rules, that could be a problem. Andersen decided to make a significant marketing element out of the fact that at Andersen, the local engagement partner (e.g. David Duncan, in the case of Enron) would have final say as to the auditing standards used. No need for things to get held up by some board at headquarters or worse, overruled.
Needless to say, this was a system whose architecture would inevitably corrupt the local engagement partners. David Duncan did some stupid and perhaps criminal things, but the real misdeed was done by whoever decided to adopt the policy of auditing standards being settled by the local engagement partner. Greedy dumb bastards.
I took the time to go back and look up where I read about this so you wouldn't have to take my word for it. You can find it discussed in this interesting Business Week Online article. Worth reading.
When I started web programming 2 years ago and faced the choice between working with Java, Perl and up-n-coming PHP, I looked around and it seemed to me that the people using Perl were doing the most innovative, creative stuff on the web. (Slashdot's "distributed moderation" scheme, which I regard as a quantum improvement over USENET moderation for providing large-traffic yet readable forums was just one example.)
I wanted to do innovative, creative stuff, so I started writing Perl.
No regrets. I don't think that aspect of Perl has been particularly usurped. Nor do I think there's another language which provides a platform for faster time-to-market and feature iteration.
As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, and Java and PHP have their own distinct advantages also.
(by comparing timescales, current Linux would be Windows 3.1)
I think the timescales for 32-bit Windows and 32-bit Linux are actually about the same, a rarely-recognized set of facts. Linux development started in 1988-1989, Windows NT development started about October 1988. Windows NT, true, built off a bit of earlier Win16(Win3.1) stuff (although not much), and Linux built off GNU and XFree86, but both were pretty much ground-up redesigns, and are about the same age.
I disagree about one other issue you mention. I'm not convince that driver availability is a problem that will be solved by time. Many hardware manufacturers don't care to provide the necessary work or information. Support for Linux peripherals has been and will be a bit like a bell-curve-- really old and really new hardware is less likely to be supported (and at any given point in time more really old and really new hardware will end up being supported by Windows OSes). For example, if my 6-year old 400 MB Iomega tape backup program doesn't have Linux support yet, I doubt it ever will. Time in this case is my enemy, not my friend. At a certain point, the hardware gets so obscure and obsolete that the ego-value of writing your own driver goes to zero, and there's no other incentive for development (unless you had a really really critical need.) And new stuff is continually coming out (with Win support upon shipment and Linux support only there if you are lucky or diligent.)
Personally, I mainly deal with the problem by buying hardware that looks like it'll work with Linux (or buying a dual-boot system with it pre-installed). But most Linux first-timers don't go that route.
I think your main point about Linux's biggest strength and biggest weakness is spot-on though.
Replying a bit late here, but I think you make a good suggestion. Central servers can be DOSed but just storing moderation points on em sounds potentially useful. Kind of a shame though for people on dialup or using DSL/cable DHCP connections that they lose all their reputational karma when they reboot or reconnect.
As I mentioned to one previous poster, the main problem with signing users is that you've now created a pretty strong evidentiary chain implicating the original person who is distributing the song with his 'nickname'. Given the 80/20 rule that 20% of people share 80% of the songs, you've just made it possible for the RIAA to both identify and attempt to prosecute those 20%, and now the authenticity of the public key infrastructure gets turned against the pirates.
If the RIAA (or some other prosecuting agency) can track down your IP #, they'd probably have enough probable cause to supoena your ISP records, eventually visiting you and confiscating your hard drive, and/or easily tying you with your public key to dozens or hundreds of songs you've distributed.
Your solution is pretty good. But there is one major problem. It creates a nick that can be tracked back to the original distributor with a much higher degree of confidence than previously possible. Nicks known for high-quality/quantity uploads will become low-hanging fruit targets for RIAA prosecution.
--LP
P.S. IANAL but given where the law is these days, I'd be surprised if ping floods were legal, at least in US jurisdictions.
I think we should just dump this arbitrary human-centric base-10 metric system in favor of base-8. Just dump the digits 8 and 9. It'd make it a lot easier for designing computer hardware, and it would be more in harmony with the underlying binary nature of the universe.
You must be buying cheap servers. RDRAM is used in more expensive servers, in part due to the high bandwidth it provides (and also, in part due to engineering decisions made years ago.) 8 channels of RDRAM yields 12.8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth which is certainly more than you get with PCs these days, even PC servers. Then again, the 21364 isn't shipping yet. But I don't think Intel plans on shipping that sort of CPU bandwidth by the end of the year.
I just wonder how it'll stack up performance-wise on this chart versus Power4 and Itanium2.
But the main reason I suspect one would buy one of these is because you want binary compatibility with all your old high-performance Alpha code that you invested so many man-years in.
If you just hook the website up so it emails you and your boss whenever someone hits a glitch (database error, whatever) on your website, you'll get a lot more support for adequate testing. I did this inadvertently at one point and believe me, it gets a lot of attention but my bosses definitely appreciate testing more.
They'll come demanding an explanation and you tell em that to prevent that in the future, it is a common rule of thumb at Microsoft (and they're the best in the industry from your bosses' perspective, right?) that they spend at least one person testing for every person programming. So half the time developing is debugging. (i.e. its not just your incompetence... even the smart people do loads of testing.) Then step back and let management decide what to do.
If they're stupid at that point, do you really want to be there?
That said, fixing every bug no matter how big or small is a luxury your company may not have. Stay levelheaded yourself.
I presumed that, if the band had CDs for sale in the store, both copy protected and imported CDs and if they were on RealPlay and MusicPress (or whatever), that A) that means the band is on a non-trivial label, and B) that label would not allow P2P copying of the albums (I know of no label that does that has all those distribution channels.)
But perhaps I'm being pedantic. I get your point. It'd be a lot clearer if the EFF said that.
EFF really hedged on the issue of using P2P networks... they said by downloading the band's tunes (sold at a normal CD store), you "may" have violated copyright.
Well duh, of course you did. I know there may be 100% legal uses of P2P networks, but the scenario described in the game doesn't come close to any of them. (And thus the game fails to fully illustrate how the current system sucks for someone committed to not breaking the law.) But I guess if it gets kids to read all that legalistic interpretation of what may and may not be legal, it's worth the hedging, eh? Carabella definitely violated copyright in that scenario. Am I missing something?
Still, their 'faq' of sorts was pretty good at addressing a lot of issues in a reasonably short space.
Actually, it's a lot less than a decade for most UNIX vendors.
DEC had 64-bits first; 1992/1993 I believe, with SGI not too long afterwards. So the two guys with lowest marketshare were pretty fast out of the blocks. But where were things a few years ago? By late 1998, all the RISC vendors had at least one 64-bit piece of hardware, with half of Sun and HP's product lines moved over, IBM just starting, and SGI shipping all 64-bit hardware. But various players hadn't finished all the OS-level stuff to support that. (Source for all that here.) The transition to 64-bits wasn't done for UNIX players even 3.5 years ago, so "across their whole market" is really way too strong a statement. Wintel ran on 64-bit Alpha support long ago, but actual 64-bit APIs were still in development back in that timeframe; I haven't seen how far along they are now.
At one point in my career, I analyzed 64 bit marketing for several projects. Basically, saying "we're 64-bit, they aren't" was never a very compelling argument to begin with. Sure, in a few cases (very large databases, but not very very large databases) it made a difference, but at the end of the day, it didn't win any hardware players a lot of business.
Saying "64-bit is better" is easy, showing that 64-bit is worth paying more money is typically hard.
You're right that 64-bit Intel will likely win over 64-bit RISC long-term is right. But Intel is having huge problems executing on 64-bit Intel stuff. Itanium was a loser. We'll see how competitive McKinley is.
Right now, and I suspect for some time to come, Sun and SGI will continue to sell better hardware primarily based on "more reliable", "more scalable" kinds of features within the hardware (as usual, features requiring OS support), not leaning too heavily on the 64-bit argument.
Microsoft: Windows and Office has carried them far, but now it seems like their strategy is to throw stuff at the walls and point to whatever sticks and say, "We did that -- we're still innovative and capable of leading the industry." XBox, set-top boxes/Ultimate TV, mobile phones, PocketPCs, embedded Windows... sheesh. On second thought, I guess they deliver value by making sure whatever they do integrates well with their monopoly product
Um, you're missing something. Microsoft's strategy is still Windows. All the things you mentioned (XBox, set-top boxes/Ultimate TV, mobile phones, PocketPCs, embedded Windows) are either Windows-based or non-Windows alternatives designed to prevent low-end substitutes for Windows from arising or taking significant market share. MS cannibalized the "big iron" above it, and they're merely being wisely paranoid, attempting to control the platforms 'below' them so they don't fall victim to the same dynamics. Preserving the OS monopoly is still strategy #1.
True enough; I didn't use the NeXTs too often, and I don't recall opening up a browser there, other than to notice that it wasn't much. There wasn't a killer app for those NeXTs (insert irony here); they were kinda buried in the basement, pretty, but I couldn't access the pretty stuff from across campus, which made SunOS more useful at the time.
Sure, Berners-Lee's browser might have been a GUI (I notice you call it graphical), but only barely, as the 99% text screen shots you see in your link indicate. No GUI controls beyond a scroll bar. I think the phrase TBL used on that webpage, "subclassing the Text object" aptly describes it. And you'll see a couple inline images there which Berner's Lee mentions showed up in 1993, although he doesn't mention that the <IMG> tag came from Marc and Eric's Mosaic I believe. (Not that they didn't steal most of their ideas from others too...) But hey, Berners-Lee didn't invent hyper-text either. Everyone stands on the shoulders of other giants. Let's give Marc and Eric some credit; they midwifed the web from it's embryonic stage to a successful delivery as a mass medium. (I'll leave you to decide whether Gates would be the benevolent godfather or the evil uncle in this analogy.)
--LP
P.S. I do blame Marc partially for the death of Netscape. When he went around saying in the press that Netscape was going to destroy Microsoft, he was really shaking up the hornet's nest. Just dumb. Especially for a guy trying to do strategy. Gates lived in fear of IBM for years before he finally made his break.
Hadn't seen that one; thanks. It's a nice myth-buster that sort of tells you what Marc didn't do, although I find it a little unsatisfying that it doesn't really tell you what he did do, other than all that 'bad stuff'. (For example, what code *did* he write within Mosaic, and to what degree did he set the direction of the software development; his role as software "architect" and, ultimately, visionary? Didn't Marc and Eric Bina add the tag, for example? Eric Bina may have written a lot of the code, but Marc was hardly incompetent: "'Marc always had the intent to get out of programming,' said Bina, 'which was funny because he was so good at it.'" )
All I remember firsthand from that particular period about Marc was reading a bunch of USENET posts about content vs. presentation in 1994. (A battle for display-independence that he clearly eventually lost.) My impression of him at the time was that he was responsible for the Mosaic browser's development and setting its technical direction. The GQ article neither says that nor quite denies it, but that's the basis on which I claim that Jim Clark wasn't the visionary and Marc was just a hanger-on, the original poster's claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Most traditional newspapers have fact checking departments and rules that information must be vouched for by two independent sources. Drudge doesn't do all that stuff, so in some ways he's a bit more vulnerable to hoaxing.
Since he's broken enough news that turned out to be true (thanks to getting on the 'A' list for leaks seeking wide distribution), he has enough credibility to turn out OK. And the traditional guys don't always do the fact checking they should, or in the case like this, they can report the fact that "Drudge is reporting that Two Towers has been leaked" which is of course 100% true.
Plus as you say, it sells more papers. In any case, the old adage holds: don't believe everything you read.
--LP
Yeah, that webpage is a great explanation of dipoles and van der Waals forces. What I don't get is how the dipole interaction changes when the 'hair' is at a different angle (which is, as I understand it, how the Gecko 'unsticks' his leg, by changing the angle of his leg as other posters here have pointed out.)
--LP
Whether MySQL or Postgres, I don't care as long as open source ends up being a platform for databases. Microsoft can try to portray Linux as a niche webserver platform now, but with a solid foothold as a database platform, open software, as a platform, will be substantially harder to dislodge.
--LinuxParanoid
Harganon who has worked his ass off for 40 years to try and get not only the brightest but also the most interesting and able students no matter what their background has been forced out of a job which has basicly been his whole life for a long time.
One minor correction: Hargadon wasn't really forced out over this. I believe he had publicly said (well before the incident) that he was retiring and it was time to look for a successor. He bears some responsibility since A) the buck stops at him, and B) he was notified of the situation and didn't stop it, but in my mind, he's not nearly as culpable because he is (to the best of my knowledge) old and fairly computer clueless; he's really more of a sports guy. (A major hallmark of his career at Princeton was prioritizing the number of and quality of jocks on campus to create many highly successful and NCAA championship sports teams.) Did he really understand what was going on? I doubt it. He never participated directly, and he's on the way out anyway. It's a minor blemish at the end of a distinguished career.
Now for Mr. LeMenager, it's a major disaster. As a potential successor to Hargadon (I presume, reading a bit between the lines here), he showed very poor judgement thrice: once when entering Yale's website with some other student's SSN, a second time when he shared that knowledge with other staffers without telling people it'd be wrong, and third, by trying to excuse his behavior with the oldest, dumbest excuse in the book, "I was testing someone else's security!" (note: without their permission).
Mr. LeMenager clearly knew that accessing a site with SSNs was, in theory, wrong, since the whole point of logging in was to show to Yale that something everyone agreed was "wrong", was in fact way too easy to do. If you had interviewed Mr. LeMenager a year ago and asked him if a Harvard admissions officer logged onto Princeton's network and grabbed admissions data and said he was just "testing Princeton's security" would LeMenager have said that was OK? Somehow, I doubt it.
Was it a hack? If hack implies skill, then no. Was it malicious? Probably not. Was it unethical? Absolutely.
Unfortunately, LeMenager knew just enough to be dangerous (hey, I can use SSNs) to himself, and not enough to protect himself (oops, all these accesses can be logged by IP address). In his eagerness to prove someone else (Yale) wrong or stupid, he made a number of wrong and stupid things himself.
I think Tilghman comes out smelling like a rose in one of the first crises of her administration; the punishments described seem exactly right for all involved from my subjective perspective. For such unethical and stupid actions from such a post of responsibility, and for making the whole university look bad and shady, LeMenager should have been fired, but since he's been such a good employee for 20 years and his actions weren't really malicious per se, he's given the benefit of the doubt and shuffled somewhere else. Assuming he really liked admissions work, he can gracefully take the hint and leave when he gets an offer elsewhere. After all, what he did isn't *that* bad. Or if he really loves Princeton, he can contribute somewhere else where his ethical lapse won't be relevant to ongoing assessments of his performance. Other admissions employees who used applicant's SSNs and should have known better get disciplined, Hargadon issues a public apology and accepts ultimate responsibility. And Tilghman succeeded doing the key things that were necessary to resolve the situation quickly and appropriately, making it a top priority to A) apologize to the Yale applicants who were affected, personally, and check for ongoing grievances related to the incident, B) figured out how to get a fairly independent investigation conducted so she'd have the right facts, and C) asserted the proper ethical expectations of all involved (none of this "we were testing their security" crap), without hiding details or excusing bad behavior.
--LP, who asks that you pardon his ranting
The irony is that if graphics cards take the place of 'beowulf clusters' for Renderman rendering farms, this whole scenario is a net minus for Linux.
;-)
So be careful what you root for.
--LP, who imagines the truth is somewhere in between
Yawn, read the thread before you flame. The parent post to mine mentioned websites for half a dozen other *gas-powered* flying devices besides the Draganflier (whose website I *did* read and whose limitations prompted my question), and that post's author asked if anyone had any questions about the field in general.
--LP
Can any of these A) be controlled by your PC in some manner so that I could control their direction with computer, B) have videocamera attachments with input that thus could be read by computer, and C) stay up in the air for 15 minutes?
It's a marvelous device. The one thing I was really bummed about was that it only went 5 minutes on battery. That's a pretty big limitation if you think about it. Even 15 minutes would be a heck of a lot better.
And the robotics professor who tried controlling it by computer really only got it to fly up 15 centimeters and land without help. That was a bit disappointing, as I'd love to work on programming one of these puppies.
--LP
This may not be the definitive answer to the question, "Why Andersen, but not KPMG/PWC/E&Y/C&L?", that you raise in point #3, but to me, it's a darn good one:
All auditing companies have an internal review panel for reviewing auditing practices when questions arise, right? But when a client wanted to stretch the rules, that could be a problem. Andersen decided to make a significant marketing element out of the fact that at Andersen, the local engagement partner (e.g. David Duncan, in the case of Enron) would have final say as to the auditing standards used. No need for things to get held up by some board at headquarters or worse, overruled.
Needless to say, this was a system whose architecture would inevitably corrupt the local engagement partners. David Duncan did some stupid and perhaps criminal things, but the real misdeed was done by whoever decided to adopt the policy of auditing standards being settled by the local engagement partner. Greedy dumb bastards.
I took the time to go back and look up where I read about this so you wouldn't have to take my word for it. You can find it discussed in this interesting Business Week Online article. Worth reading.
--LP
When I started web programming 2 years ago and faced the choice between working with Java, Perl and up-n-coming PHP, I looked around and it seemed to me that the people using Perl were doing the most innovative, creative stuff on the web. (Slashdot's "distributed moderation" scheme, which I regard as a quantum improvement over USENET moderation for providing large-traffic yet readable forums was just one example.)
I wanted to do innovative, creative stuff, so I started writing Perl.
No regrets. I don't think that aspect of Perl has been particularly usurped. Nor do I think there's another language which provides a platform for faster time-to-market and feature iteration.
As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, and Java and PHP have their own distinct advantages also.
--LP
Apologies. Rechecked my history sources... Linus began working on Linux in April 1991. Don't know quite where I got that wrong date in my mind. Bleh.
--LP
Cambridge Display Technologies has a nice article
describing the underlying physics and some technical issues involved with developing the material.
--LP
(by comparing timescales, current Linux would be Windows 3.1)
I think the timescales for 32-bit Windows and 32-bit Linux are actually about the same, a rarely-recognized set of facts. Linux development started in 1988-1989, Windows NT development started about October 1988. Windows NT, true, built off a bit of earlier Win16(Win3.1) stuff (although not much), and Linux built off GNU and XFree86, but both were pretty much ground-up redesigns, and are about the same age.
I disagree about one other issue you mention. I'm not convince that driver availability is a problem that will be solved by time. Many hardware manufacturers don't care to provide the necessary work or information. Support for Linux peripherals has been and will be a bit like a bell-curve-- really old and really new hardware is less likely to be supported (and at any given point in time more really old and really new hardware will end up being supported by Windows OSes). For example, if my 6-year old 400 MB Iomega tape backup program doesn't have Linux support yet, I doubt it ever will. Time in this case is my enemy, not my friend. At a certain point, the hardware gets so obscure and obsolete that the ego-value of writing your own driver goes to zero, and there's no other incentive for development (unless you had a really really critical need.) And new stuff is continually coming out (with Win support upon shipment and Linux support only there if you are lucky or diligent.)
Personally, I mainly deal with the problem by buying hardware that looks like it'll work with Linux (or buying a dual-boot system with it pre-installed). But most Linux first-timers don't go that route.
I think your main point about Linux's biggest strength and biggest weakness is spot-on though.
--LinuxParanoid, who started with Linux in 1992
Replying a bit late here, but I think you make a good suggestion. Central servers can be DOSed but just storing moderation points on em sounds potentially useful. Kind of a shame though for people on dialup or using DSL/cable DHCP connections that they lose all their reputational karma when they reboot or reconnect.
--LP
As I mentioned to one previous poster, the main problem with signing users is that you've now created a pretty strong evidentiary chain implicating the original person who is distributing the song with his 'nickname'. Given the 80/20 rule that 20% of people share 80% of the songs, you've just made it possible for the RIAA to both identify and attempt to prosecute those 20%, and now the authenticity of the public key infrastructure gets turned against the pirates.
If the RIAA (or some other prosecuting agency) can track down your IP #, they'd probably have enough probable cause to supoena your ISP records, eventually visiting you and confiscating your hard drive, and/or easily tying you with your public key to dozens or hundreds of songs you've distributed.
--LP
Your solution is pretty good. But there is one major problem. It creates a nick that can be tracked back to the original distributor with a much higher degree of confidence than previously possible. Nicks known for high-quality/quantity uploads will become low-hanging fruit targets for RIAA prosecution.
--LP
P.S. IANAL but given where the law is these days, I'd be surprised if ping floods were legal, at least in US jurisdictions.
I think we should just dump this arbitrary human-centric base-10 metric system in favor of base-8. Just dump the digits 8 and 9. It'd make it a lot easier for designing computer hardware, and it would be more in harmony with the underlying binary nature of the universe.
--LP
You must be buying cheap servers. RDRAM is used in more expensive servers, in part due to the high bandwidth it provides (and also, in part due to engineering decisions made years ago.) 8 channels of RDRAM yields 12.8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth which is certainly more than you get with PCs these days, even PC servers. Then again, the 21364 isn't shipping yet. But I don't think Intel plans on shipping that sort of CPU bandwidth by the end of the year.
And back to your point about economics of RDRAM, there is money out there that will pay a premium for performance scalability (at least when combined with reliability). About 11 percent of all servers -- command as much as 60 percent of all server revenue.
I just wonder how it'll stack up performance-wise on this chart versus Power4 and Itanium2.
But the main reason I suspect one would buy one of these is because you want binary compatibility with all your old high-performance Alpha code that you invested so many man-years in.
--LP
If you just hook the website up so it emails you and your boss whenever someone hits a glitch (database error, whatever) on your website, you'll get a lot more support for adequate testing. I did this inadvertently at one point and believe me, it gets a lot of attention but my bosses definitely appreciate testing more.
They'll come demanding an explanation and you tell em that to prevent that in the future, it is a common rule of thumb at Microsoft (and they're the best in the industry from your bosses' perspective, right?) that they spend at least one person testing for every person programming. So half the time developing is debugging. (i.e. its not just your incompetence... even the smart people do loads of testing.) Then step back and let management decide what to do.
If they're stupid at that point, do you really want to be there?
That said, fixing every bug no matter how big or small is a luxury your company may not have. Stay levelheaded yourself.
--LP
I presumed that, if the band had CDs for sale in the store, both copy protected and imported CDs and if they were on RealPlay and MusicPress (or whatever), that A) that means the band is on a non-trivial label, and B) that label would not allow P2P copying of the albums (I know of no label that does that has all those distribution channels.)
But perhaps I'm being pedantic. I get your point. It'd be a lot clearer if the EFF said that.
--LP
EFF really hedged on the issue of using P2P networks... they said by downloading the band's tunes (sold at a normal CD store), you "may" have violated copyright.
Well duh, of course you did. I know there may be 100% legal uses of P2P networks, but the scenario described in the game doesn't come close to any of them. (And thus the game fails to fully illustrate how the current system sucks for someone committed to not breaking the law.) But I guess if it gets kids to read all that legalistic interpretation of what may and may not be legal, it's worth the hedging, eh? Carabella definitely violated copyright in that scenario. Am I missing something?
Still, their 'faq' of sorts was pretty good at addressing a lot of issues in a reasonably short space.
--LP
UNIX: about a decade across their whole market.
Actually, it's a lot less than a decade for most UNIX vendors.
DEC had 64-bits first; 1992/1993 I believe, with SGI not too long afterwards. So the two guys with lowest marketshare were pretty fast out of the blocks. But where were things a few years ago? By late 1998, all the RISC vendors had at least one 64-bit piece of hardware, with half of Sun and HP's product lines moved over, IBM just starting, and SGI shipping all 64-bit hardware. But various players hadn't finished all the OS-level stuff to support that. (Source for all that here.) The transition to 64-bits wasn't done for UNIX players even 3.5 years ago, so "across their whole market" is really way too strong a statement. Wintel ran on 64-bit Alpha support long ago, but actual 64-bit APIs were still in development back in that timeframe; I haven't seen how far along they are now.
At one point in my career, I analyzed 64 bit marketing for several projects. Basically, saying "we're 64-bit, they aren't" was never a very compelling argument to begin with. Sure, in a few cases (very large databases, but not very very large databases) it made a difference, but at the end of the day, it didn't win any hardware players a lot of business.
Saying "64-bit is better" is easy, showing that 64-bit is worth paying more money is typically hard.
You're right that 64-bit Intel will likely win over 64-bit RISC long-term is right. But Intel is having huge problems executing on 64-bit Intel stuff. Itanium was a loser. We'll see how competitive McKinley is.
Right now, and I suspect for some time to come, Sun and SGI will continue to sell better hardware primarily based on "more reliable", "more scalable" kinds of features within the hardware (as usual, features requiring OS support), not leaning too heavily on the 64-bit argument.
--LP
Microsoft: Windows and Office has carried them far, but now it seems like their strategy is to throw stuff at the walls and point to whatever sticks and say, "We did that -- we're still innovative and capable of leading the industry." XBox, set-top boxes/Ultimate TV, mobile phones, PocketPCs, embedded Windows ... sheesh. On second thought, I guess they deliver value by making sure whatever they do integrates well with their monopoly product
Um, you're missing something. Microsoft's strategy is still Windows. All the things you mentioned (XBox, set-top boxes/Ultimate TV, mobile phones, PocketPCs, embedded Windows) are either Windows-based or non-Windows alternatives designed to prevent low-end substitutes for Windows from arising or taking significant market share. MS cannibalized the "big iron" above it, and they're merely being wisely paranoid, attempting to control the platforms 'below' them so they don't fall victim to the same dynamics. Preserving the OS monopoly is still strategy #1.
--LP
True enough; I didn't use the NeXTs too often, and I don't recall opening up a browser there, other than to notice that it wasn't much. There wasn't a killer app for those NeXTs (insert irony here); they were kinda buried in the basement, pretty, but I couldn't access the pretty stuff from across campus, which made SunOS more useful at the time.
Sure, Berners-Lee's browser might have been a GUI (I notice you call it graphical), but only barely, as the 99% text screen shots you see in your link indicate. No GUI controls beyond a scroll bar. I think the phrase TBL used on that webpage, "subclassing the Text object" aptly describes it. And you'll see a couple inline images there which Berner's Lee mentions showed up in 1993, although he doesn't mention that the <IMG> tag came from Marc and Eric's Mosaic I believe. (Not that they didn't steal most of their ideas from others too...) But hey, Berners-Lee didn't invent hyper-text either. Everyone stands on the shoulders of other giants. Let's give Marc and Eric some credit; they midwifed the web from it's embryonic stage to a successful delivery as a mass medium. (I'll leave you to decide whether Gates would be the benevolent godfather or the evil uncle in this analogy.)
--LP
P.S. I do blame Marc partially for the death of Netscape. When he went around saying in the press that Netscape was going to destroy Microsoft, he was really shaking up the hornet's nest. Just dumb. Especially for a guy trying to do strategy. Gates lived in fear of IBM for years before he finally made his break.
Hadn't seen that one; thanks. It's a nice myth-buster that sort of tells you what Marc didn't do, although I find it a little unsatisfying that it doesn't really tell you what he did do, other than all that 'bad stuff'. (For example, what code *did* he write within Mosaic, and to what degree did he set the direction of the software development; his role as software "architect" and, ultimately, visionary? Didn't Marc and Eric Bina add the tag, for example? Eric Bina may have written a lot of the code, but Marc was hardly incompetent: "'Marc always had the intent to get out of programming,' said Bina, 'which was funny because he was so good at it.'" )
All I remember firsthand from that particular period about Marc was reading a bunch of USENET posts about content vs. presentation in 1994. (A battle for display-independence that he clearly eventually lost.) My impression of him at the time was that he was responsible for the Mosaic browser's development and setting its technical direction. The GQ article neither says that nor quite denies it, but that's the basis on which I claim that Jim Clark wasn't the visionary and Marc was just a hanger-on, the original poster's claim.
--LP