Quite simply because I'm more familiar with Linux and I wasn't aware a BSD solution existed. I needed a software solution with full NAT and firewall, and I knew it was available in linux 2.4. And, frankly, we haven't had any problems with it at all. No crashes, unexplained slowdowns, or weird security problems. This issue actually doesn't affect me at all, since I don't use conntrack_ftp on this firewall (no FTP servers behind it), but I'm patching it anyways in case we use it in the future.
Now that I know a BSD solution exists, I'll make a note of it. But since we're not having problems with this setup, I'm not inclined to move it to BSD. From the department of redundancy department, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
As you said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And conversely, if it is broke, fix it as soon as possible.
I run a couple 2.4 production firewalls because we needed features available in IpTables that aren't available in IpChains, such as full NAT. There are reasons to run a bleeding edge firewall like a 2.4 system in production, you just have to balance the benefits with the cost of running something that is essentially beta.
In my case, the features outweigh the risk. I can deal with a little downtime, if neccessary, and I have other firewalls that give me rudimentary protection if my 2.4 box fails. Sure, it's not for you, and that's great. But it doesn't mean it's not for everyone.
AOL has been ordered to open the protocol and their servers to either "server-to-server interoperability" or direct retrieval of information by competing clients. I wouldn't say their actions fall within "their rights," then, would you?
Actually, you're wrong. You can't take a section of the order out of context and expect it to stand. That whole section of the order that deals with remedies for AIM only apply to the next generation of AIM. It specifically says at the start that AOL-TW may not offer an AIM-like application with new features not present in 4.3 or ICQ as it currently stands until one of those remedies are met.
And it doesn't even say that they have to open up. It says they either need to 1) implement a standard protocol (which to my knowledge there isn't yet); 2) enter into a contract for interoperability with another IM provider, and then set up 2 more such contracts within 180 days after that, however it doesn't specify that these have to be no-cost or low-cost contracts; or 3) show that they lost IM market share and haven't led the market for 4 consecutive months.
So you see, unless and until the IETF or someone else comes out with a standard IM protocol (not a proposal), AOL's only option is to set up contracts with other IM providers. But it doesn't say they have to give it away. And in addition, while they do have to report every 6 months (it hasn't been 6 months since the merger was completed), the only timeframe for this is "before you implement new AIM features". So AOL could sidestep the whole thing by freezing the features on AIM and ICQ.
Why do people insist on using OSCAR? Is being able to view away messages that important to you? If you answer yes, then stop bitching every time AOL makes a change that breaks your client.
One more time, and I'll spell it out slowly for everyone out there who like 2 syllable words. There are two protocols that AOL Instant Messenger uses. The first is OSCAR. It is more powerful, yes, and it's also AOL's "private" protocol. It's not supported except for AOL-developed clients, and any 3rd party implementation that uses OSCAR is a hack. The other protocol is TOC, which AOL has made available to the community for 3rd party clients. If you use OSCAR despite this, you get what you deserve.
I would say yes. But it might depend on whether or not they copyright the ISO image. It's also possible that the FSF told them "Sure, you can do this. But if someone else downloads it and then posts it themselves, on their own hardware and bandwidth, you really can't say anything."
It's paying for the work of aggregating the various programs into a distro, running servers to host it, and having bandwidth to allow you to download it. If you don't like it, you can go put your own distro together, but personally I'd rather pay someone else $15 to do it for me.
In addition, what is your authority to say that this is a clear breach of the GPL when the FSF has said otherwise? I think they have slightly more authority when it comes to the GPL than you do.
I agree that their implementation needs some work. However, if you think of it as you paying for their servers and bandwidth, then maybe you should pay every time you download it from their site. If you don't want to pay every time, archive a copy locally after you get it.
However, I don't agree with you that this should be a donation instead of a fee. If you make it optional, they're back to the same point where hardly anyone's going to pay them. Sure, if they make it easier to donate, they'll prolly get a little more money, but I don't think it will be a significant increase. Do you donate money to every organization that develops free software that you download? I know I don't.
The GPL doesn't define what the "physical act of transferring a copy" is. It doesn't specify that the method of transfer has to be physical. It's really up to the GNU project and the FSF to define this, and they have said that it's OK (or so we are led to believe).
And personally, I think that this is a perfectly acceptable fee. Servers and bandwidth don't grow on trees. Someone has to pay for them. So why shouldn't they be able to charge a fee for the use of these things if they want to?
They're not charging for the GPL'd work of others. They're charging for packaging that work into a distribution. And they're charging for the cost of their servers to host it, and the cost of the people to maintain those servers, and the cost of the bandwidth. Those servers and bandwidth aren't free, and I don't see money coming in from anywhere else to support them.
You're still free to go and get the GPL'd works yourself and put them together into your own distribution.
Now instant messaging in it's current state is horrible. We have a disjoint set of non-structured namespaces (BigMan200 anybody?), We have a single centralised server. And the protocol is closed.
No. We have a bunch of separate namespaces, each with their own centralized server. And each one has it's own protocol, which is either open or closed. But it doesn't matter, because they don't talk to each other.
I think AIM needs to be confiscated from AOL. While I think they do have a right to make a very nice looking client, and a server that can deal with huge loads, and use them to make a profit, they should not be allowed to lock up the protocol between the two.
Again, no. They should not be allowed to lock up the idea, but they can do whatever they want with the protocol. They wrote it. Don't like it? Write your own protocol. Noone's stopping you, least of all AOL.
So, what I'm saying is: The client can stay AOL's. The server can stay AOL's. But the protocol should be open and hacker friendly. Please AOL, let the Internet do the right thing. It may be bad for your monopoly on the technology, but it will be good for avoiding the scrutiny of the anti-trust lawyers in years to come. Write some RFCs. Asciify your protocol. Amaze people with your Clue.
And once again, no. If AOL wants to run a private system, it's their right. How would you like it if you developed a huge intranet with a nice customer database or such, email, and all kinds of other services, gave access to it to a few people (friends and coworkers) and the government came along and said "Oh, this is nice. Now you have to run this service and let everyone in the world access it as much as they like." Cause that's what you're saying they should do to AOL.
I would agree with you wholeheartedly if AOL was trying to prevent everyone else from developing their own IM protocols and systems, but they're not. They're just keeping their own system private. Go work on the open standards protocols. If one gets developed that is so great, and everyone starts adopting it as the standard, then maybe you'll take some AIM customers away from AOL, or force them to be compatible.
Think about it like MS Exchange, or Groupwise, or CC:Mail. All of these have their own private protocol that they use to talk to their own kind. However, SMTP is so overwhelmingly popular on the Internet, that they all have SMTP gateway applications so that they can talk the standard. But it's not illegal for them to have their own private protocols and not open them up, and if they wanted to not talk SMTP, then they could, but they wouldn't be able to email very many people.
And this is not to mention that AOL *does* have a semi-open protocol, TOC. It's not open to changes from the tech community, but it is open so that 3rd party clients can be written and used.
First off, it's just OSCAR-based clients that are broken. TOC-based clients work fine. And frankly, everyone should be using TOC, since that's the protocol that AOL "opened" for clone clients.
However, the major point of this post is that I honestly don't understand why everyone gets so worked up about what AOL does with AIM. Let's look at this logically. While we've always had things like talk/ntalk, AOL really pioneered the instant messaging field with AIM and ICQ (yes, I count ICQ as AOL's because they bought it, so any innovations by Mirabilis belong to AOL now). It's their servers, their network, their software, and their innovations. So basically, why can't they do whatever they want with it?
You don't like it? Write your own. Lots of people have, and there are open standards projects. If the open standards are good enough and enough people adopt them, then AOL will have to join or fade away. But noone really has a place to tell AOL what to do or not to do with AIM. It's theirs, completely. And if they don't want to let MSN or Yahoo play in their sandbox, it's their decision. And if they want to keep the OSCAR protocol for the "official" clients and only let everyone else use TOC, it's their choice as well.
Let's remember, folks, having a monopoly on something is not illegal. It's how you use that monopoly. AOL isn't trying to squash the open standards projects for IMs, and they're not trying to run MSN and Yahoo and the rest of the people who have developed IM clients out of business. They're just running their own IM system as best they can, getting new signups, and trying to enforce their rules about how the system is used. Which is all perfectly legal, and well within their rights. ---
Michael, I really wish you'd read the article before delving into making comments on it. The article is not talking about paper books. It's talking about electronic materials (journals, e-books, etc.). And it's not talking about one library loaning it to another library. They're talking about one library purchasing it and then giving it to other libraries (ie. making lots of copies).
Now, granted this is a step down a slippery slope, as in Richard Stallman's Right to Read piece, however that's not the topic of the article, and you shouldn't attribute these things that you've made up to Patricia Schroeder, because she didnt' say them.
You know, as much as we beat up on copyrights around here, people do deserve to get paid for their work if that's what they want. It's just like software licenses (even open source). If you like the program, but you don't like the license, then find another program. If the program is one of a kind, or there are features that you really need, then you have to decide whether this outweighs the cost of a license you don't like. Same with published materials. If you like a particular author/artist's work, but they want to get paid for it and you don't want to pay, then find another author/artist or decide whether you wanting their work outweighs the cost of paying for it.
Open source and free software are a great idea, but it's not the One True Path (tm). If all sofware were free, a lot of us would be out of jobs, or at least not living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Society's not going to instantly jump to some idyllic state where everything's free, a la Star Trek. The right of people to get paid for their work is a neccessary part of the way things are. Now I'm not saying that the systems by which we protect these rights are perfect, or the systems by which people get paid are without grift. But you can't do away with these systems.
Yes, fair use is disappearing. Yes, the DMCA steps way over the line. Yes, companies like the MPAA and RIAA are trying to erode our freedoms more and more by making us pay and repay for things and then still not letting us access in a way that would be legal. But the key is not to fight the system and have it eliminated. The key is to reform the system. If you try and get rid of it completely, you won't win.
Hemos, you ought to be ashamed. After posting the story this morning with your comments about Linus and Linux in it, and then seeing all the comments about how lame and alarmist it was, you go and change the story, make it look like you're the calm and collected one, and don't even post a note that it's changed?
While I can appreciate the humor, I do have to take exception here...
This new camera thing sounds pretty cool, even though every single car company has been using this technique in their commercials for the past two years.
I'm sorry, are you seriously comparing camera technology developed for a live event with camera technology for commercials? Commercials are staged in advance, painstakingly prepared, and touched up again and again. What they use for filming commercials isn't even close to what they're doing here.
It's so far removed, even if you just consider the fact that this new technology is realtime. And yes, it is realtime. They have to track/zoom the cameras in realtime to be able to play back an instant replay, and the camera tracking and zoom is the really hard part of this, not the stitching together of video streams to make a 270 degree rotation.
Nope, I meant what I said. The receiver limits the quality of any other component (I don't consider the speakers a "component" as such). If you have a crappy receiver, then it really won't matter what you have for speakers. However, I definitely agree with you that the speakers then limit the sound coming out of the receiver. Crappy speakers, and it doesn't matter what you have for a receiver or anything else.
But I believe that you need to consider the receiver/amp/speakers all together. While the speakers are the endpoint for the sound in your system, all three pieces are bottlenecks. You can't buy reference speakers and a Radio Shack receiver and expect to get great sound. And you can't buy Radio Shack speakers and an expensive THX receiver either. Don't make the mistake of believing that either of the bottlenecks in your audio system is more important than the other.
I have a full set of Cambridge SoundWorks speakers in my setup right now. I used their MovieWorks 5.1 speaker system (large center channel, matched pair for left & right, matched pair for left and right surrounds, and a BassCube 10), and added an extra pair of surrounds for the left and right rear surround channels, for a full 6.1 setup. The entire set cost me about $1600, however, so that might fall a little out of your range. They do have less expensive sets, however, and I've never had a problem with their sound quality.
As far as a receiver goes, I'm using a B&K AVR307 system. It's THX EX certified, and it has more inputs/outputs than I can possibly use. Plus it's upgradeable for future standards (you can swap one of the logic boards and upgrade the software). And it has a serial port for hooking into a home automation system. But that piece was about $3500 alone. I decided that I'd rather spend the money on a really good receiver, since the receiver is going to limit the quality of any other component in the system.
I remember several years back when another "cracker" from Romania was causing problems for Undernet. Attacking servers, attacking services. Problem was that Romania has no laws regarding computer crimes, at least none worth mentioning.
However, the person in question made the mistake of attacking the norman.ok.us server, which is/was hosted by the National Severe Storms Lab. Attacking a government server is a big no-no. It was enough for one of the opers to contact a friend with CERT and get Romania's internet traffic blackholed. Sent to the bitbucket as it hit the major backbones. It was a quiet day, and suddenly there weren't any more problems from that person again.
So why not go through CERT again? If Romania's not going to respond to problems from its citizens, then they should be treated just like an ISP who won't do anything about spammers. They get the death penalty, except this time it's the Internet Death Penalty, rather than the Usenet version.
LANL has a lot more security problems than that. I did a stint over there, and the security was deplorable. There were lots of people who had computer accounts that shouldn't have (including me). Password security wasn't enforced, shadowed passwords weren't being used. It was laughable. And the physical security wasn't too much better in most places. Most of the medium security places (ie. not the plutonium facility) didn't bother to check laptops and bags and such going in and out.
Anyone else find it interesting that the "high" bid on the first auction was exactly $75k, which happened to also be the reserve, and was placed by the person who was selling the second auction (simpsonseller). And then his bid on the first auction gets cancelled saying that he didn't think anyone had 75k to spend on games (which sounds more like something the seller would say), and then the first auction immediately gets cancelled. And the second auction gets cancelled at the same time.
Like a lot of people called it, looks like it was fake from the start.
This is a very easy issue to address. Your ISP has the right to anything they want to to the files you store on their server. They can delete them, read them, modify them, or leave them alone. You, as a customer, have exactly one right. You can take your money elsewhere.
Sure, you can report them to the Better Business Bureau, but that just amounts to the same thing, customers leaving (or never signing on). Sure, you could try and take them to court for breaching their own policies, but they can pretty much change their policies whenever they like for whatever reason they like. What it boils down to is that you have very few protections that apply when it comes to dealing with a private company. It's been said before, but it's worth repeating that things like the First Amendment don't apply when you're dealing with a private company in this manner.
I just got a eLink device (RiM 850 pager) that runs Yahoo. Mail, messenger, WML browser, plus the RiM built-ins like calendar and address book. Flat rate of $35 a month. So far, it seems pretty cool. My only wish is that AOL would wake up and allow AIM to interoperate with other messaging platforms, like Yahoo.
But the point of this story is that there are value-adds that Yahoo can provide that are worth paying for. I'm going to be using this for work instead of a pager. It's much more useful, and cheaper (as far as I've seen).
What happened to the driving force behind the quality of open source: "thousands of eyes go over the code to find bugs". ?
Thousands of eyes is great. I'm sure thousands of eyes found lots of bugs. But nothing compares to live load. This is something I learned when working on larger systems, like the ones at AOL. You can comb the code as much as you want, and test it for weeks. There will still be bugs that only a live system will show. What I would guess is that these large Linux shops "test cycles" include things like running live load on the systems, and pushing them harder than they can be pushed on someone's desktop.
Also, you're way off with comparing this to MS. It's not as if you can't pull a copy of the latest test kernel and run it on your boxen and find bugs and report them. Linus is not saying that these large Linux houses get to test the kernel exclusively. All he's saying is that that's where he's expecting to find most of the last minute bugs.
The Linux community should consider itself lucky to have large shops that will test new releases internally. I have seen so much code that has been "released" by companies that are not known for bad software, that has completely fallen apart under live load. It tends to be true that the more load we put on a system, the more obscure the bugs we found. But as obscure as the bugs were, they were showstoppers to a large system. And these were things that the software companies couldn't find themselves in their QA labs because they just didn't have access to the load that we were placing on the systems.
The service should shine for big downloads, but be rather poor for highly "chatty" stuff, with many request-response pairs. Loading web pages with many small objects would be rather disappointing, I should think. Checking POP3 email, if there are many small messages, would be pretty poor.
You are absolutely correct. I know this from personal experience. See my other 2 posts under this article for some calculations and timings.
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Quite simply because I'm more familiar with Linux and I wasn't aware a BSD solution existed. I needed a software solution with full NAT and firewall, and I knew it was available in linux 2.4. And, frankly, we haven't had any problems with it at all. No crashes, unexplained slowdowns, or weird security problems. This issue actually doesn't affect me at all, since I don't use conntrack_ftp on this firewall (no FTP servers behind it), but I'm patching it anyways in case we use it in the future.
Now that I know a BSD solution exists, I'll make a note of it. But since we're not having problems with this setup, I'm not inclined to move it to BSD. From the department of redundancy department, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
-Todd
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As you said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And conversely, if it is broke, fix it as soon as possible.
I run a couple 2.4 production firewalls because we needed features available in IpTables that aren't available in IpChains, such as full NAT. There are reasons to run a bleeding edge firewall like a 2.4 system in production, you just have to balance the benefits with the cost of running something that is essentially beta.
In my case, the features outweigh the risk. I can deal with a little downtime, if neccessary, and I have other firewalls that give me rudimentary protection if my 2.4 box fails. Sure, it's not for you, and that's great. But it doesn't mean it's not for everyone.
-Todd
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If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
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AOL has been ordered to open the protocol and their servers to either "server-to-server interoperability" or direct retrieval of information by competing clients. I wouldn't say their actions fall within "their rights," then, would you?
Actually, you're wrong. You can't take a section of the order out of context and expect it to stand. That whole section of the order that deals with remedies for AIM only apply to the next generation of AIM. It specifically says at the start that AOL-TW may not offer an AIM-like application with new features not present in 4.3 or ICQ as it currently stands until one of those remedies are met.
And it doesn't even say that they have to open up. It says they either need to 1) implement a standard protocol (which to my knowledge there isn't yet); 2) enter into a contract for interoperability with another IM provider, and then set up 2 more such contracts within 180 days after that, however it doesn't specify that these have to be no-cost or low-cost contracts; or 3) show that they lost IM market share and haven't led the market for 4 consecutive months.
So you see, unless and until the IETF or someone else comes out with a standard IM protocol (not a proposal), AOL's only option is to set up contracts with other IM providers. But it doesn't say they have to give it away. And in addition, while they do have to report every 6 months (it hasn't been 6 months since the merger was completed), the only timeframe for this is "before you implement new AIM features". So AOL could sidestep the whole thing by freezing the features on AIM and ICQ.
-Todd
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Why do people insist on using OSCAR? Is being able to view away messages that important to you? If you answer yes, then stop bitching every time AOL makes a change that breaks your client.
One more time, and I'll spell it out slowly for everyone out there who like 2 syllable words. There are two protocols that AOL Instant Messenger uses. The first is OSCAR. It is more powerful, yes, and it's also AOL's "private" protocol. It's not supported except for AOL-developed clients, and any 3rd party implementation that uses OSCAR is a hack. The other protocol is TOC, which AOL has made available to the community for 3rd party clients. If you use OSCAR despite this, you get what you deserve.
-Todd
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I would say yes. But it might depend on whether or not they copyright the ISO image. It's also possible that the FSF told them "Sure, you can do this. But if someone else downloads it and then posts it themselves, on their own hardware and bandwidth, you really can't say anything."
-Todd
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It's paying for the work of aggregating the various programs into a distro, running servers to host it, and having bandwidth to allow you to download it. If you don't like it, you can go put your own distro together, but personally I'd rather pay someone else $15 to do it for me.
In addition, what is your authority to say that this is a clear breach of the GPL when the FSF has said otherwise? I think they have slightly more authority when it comes to the GPL than you do.
-Todd
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I agree that their implementation needs some work. However, if you think of it as you paying for their servers and bandwidth, then maybe you should pay every time you download it from their site. If you don't want to pay every time, archive a copy locally after you get it.
However, I don't agree with you that this should be a donation instead of a fee. If you make it optional, they're back to the same point where hardly anyone's going to pay them. Sure, if they make it easier to donate, they'll prolly get a little more money, but I don't think it will be a significant increase. Do you donate money to every organization that develops free software that you download? I know I don't.
-Todd
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The GPL doesn't define what the "physical act of transferring a copy" is. It doesn't specify that the method of transfer has to be physical. It's really up to the GNU project and the FSF to define this, and they have said that it's OK (or so we are led to believe).
And personally, I think that this is a perfectly acceptable fee. Servers and bandwidth don't grow on trees. Someone has to pay for them. So why shouldn't they be able to charge a fee for the use of these things if they want to?
-Todd
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They're not charging for the GPL'd work of others. They're charging for packaging that work into a distribution. And they're charging for the cost of their servers to host it, and the cost of the people to maintain those servers, and the cost of the bandwidth. Those servers and bandwidth aren't free, and I don't see money coming in from anywhere else to support them.
You're still free to go and get the GPL'd works yourself and put them together into your own distribution.
-Todd
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Now instant messaging in it's current state is horrible. We have a disjoint set of non-structured namespaces (BigMan200 anybody?), We have a single centralised server. And the protocol is closed.
No. We have a bunch of separate namespaces, each with their own centralized server. And each one has it's own protocol, which is either open or closed. But it doesn't matter, because they don't talk to each other.
I think AIM needs to be confiscated from AOL. While I think they do have a right to make a very nice looking client, and a server that can deal with huge loads, and use them to make a profit, they should not be allowed to lock up the protocol between the two.
Again, no. They should not be allowed to lock up the idea, but they can do whatever they want with the protocol. They wrote it. Don't like it? Write your own protocol. Noone's stopping you, least of all AOL.
So, what I'm saying is: The client can stay AOL's. The server can stay AOL's. But the protocol should be open and hacker friendly. Please AOL, let the Internet do the right thing. It may be bad for your monopoly on the technology, but it will be good for avoiding the scrutiny of the anti-trust lawyers in years to come. Write some RFCs. Asciify your protocol. Amaze people with your Clue.
And once again, no. If AOL wants to run a private system, it's their right. How would you like it if you developed a huge intranet with a nice customer database or such, email, and all kinds of other services, gave access to it to a few people (friends and coworkers) and the government came along and said "Oh, this is nice. Now you have to run this service and let everyone in the world access it as much as they like." Cause that's what you're saying they should do to AOL.
I would agree with you wholeheartedly if AOL was trying to prevent everyone else from developing their own IM protocols and systems, but they're not. They're just keeping their own system private. Go work on the open standards protocols. If one gets developed that is so great, and everyone starts adopting it as the standard, then maybe you'll take some AIM customers away from AOL, or force them to be compatible.
Think about it like MS Exchange, or Groupwise, or CC:Mail. All of these have their own private protocol that they use to talk to their own kind. However, SMTP is so overwhelmingly popular on the Internet, that they all have SMTP gateway applications so that they can talk the standard. But it's not illegal for them to have their own private protocols and not open them up, and if they wanted to not talk SMTP, then they could, but they wouldn't be able to email very many people.
And this is not to mention that AOL *does* have a semi-open protocol, TOC. It's not open to changes from the tech community, but it is open so that 3rd party clients can be written and used.
-Todd
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First off, it's just OSCAR-based clients that are broken. TOC-based clients work fine. And frankly, everyone should be using TOC, since that's the protocol that AOL "opened" for clone clients.
However, the major point of this post is that I honestly don't understand why everyone gets so worked up about what AOL does with AIM. Let's look at this logically. While we've always had things like talk/ntalk, AOL really pioneered the instant messaging field with AIM and ICQ (yes, I count ICQ as AOL's because they bought it, so any innovations by Mirabilis belong to AOL now). It's their servers, their network, their software, and their innovations. So basically, why can't they do whatever they want with it?
You don't like it? Write your own. Lots of people have, and there are open standards projects. If the open standards are good enough and enough people adopt them, then AOL will have to join or fade away. But noone really has a place to tell AOL what to do or not to do with AIM. It's theirs, completely. And if they don't want to let MSN or Yahoo play in their sandbox, it's their decision. And if they want to keep the OSCAR protocol for the "official" clients and only let everyone else use TOC, it's their choice as well.
Let's remember, folks, having a monopoly on something is not illegal. It's how you use that monopoly. AOL isn't trying to squash the open standards projects for IMs, and they're not trying to run MSN and Yahoo and the rest of the people who have developed IM clients out of business. They're just running their own IM system as best they can, getting new signups, and trying to enforce their rules about how the system is used. Which is all perfectly legal, and well within their rights.
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Michael, I really wish you'd read the article before delving into making comments on it. The article is not talking about paper books. It's talking about electronic materials (journals, e-books, etc.). And it's not talking about one library loaning it to another library. They're talking about one library purchasing it and then giving it to other libraries (ie. making lots of copies).
Now, granted this is a step down a slippery slope, as in Richard Stallman's Right to Read piece, however that's not the topic of the article, and you shouldn't attribute these things that you've made up to Patricia Schroeder, because she didnt' say them.
You know, as much as we beat up on copyrights around here, people do deserve to get paid for their work if that's what they want. It's just like software licenses (even open source). If you like the program, but you don't like the license, then find another program. If the program is one of a kind, or there are features that you really need, then you have to decide whether this outweighs the cost of a license you don't like. Same with published materials. If you like a particular author/artist's work, but they want to get paid for it and you don't want to pay, then find another author/artist or decide whether you wanting their work outweighs the cost of paying for it.
Open source and free software are a great idea, but it's not the One True Path (tm). If all sofware were free, a lot of us would be out of jobs, or at least not living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Society's not going to instantly jump to some idyllic state where everything's free, a la Star Trek. The right of people to get paid for their work is a neccessary part of the way things are. Now I'm not saying that the systems by which we protect these rights are perfect, or the systems by which people get paid are without grift. But you can't do away with these systems.
Yes, fair use is disappearing. Yes, the DMCA steps way over the line. Yes, companies like the MPAA and RIAA are trying to erode our freedoms more and more by making us pay and repay for things and then still not letting us access in a way that would be legal. But the key is not to fight the system and have it eliminated. The key is to reform the system. If you try and get rid of it completely, you won't win.
-Todd
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Hemos, you ought to be ashamed. After posting the story this morning with your comments about Linus and Linux in it, and then seeing all the comments about how lame and alarmist it was, you go and change the story, make it look like you're the calm and collected one, and don't even post a note that it's changed?
Did you think people wouldn't notice?
-Todd
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While I can appreciate the humor, I do have to take exception here...
This new camera thing sounds pretty cool, even though every single car company has been using this technique in their commercials for the past two years.
I'm sorry, are you seriously comparing camera technology developed for a live event with camera technology for commercials? Commercials are staged in advance, painstakingly prepared, and touched up again and again. What they use for filming commercials isn't even close to what they're doing here.
It's so far removed, even if you just consider the fact that this new technology is realtime. And yes, it is realtime. They have to track/zoom the cameras in realtime to be able to play back an instant replay, and the camera tracking and zoom is the really hard part of this, not the stitching together of video streams to make a 270 degree rotation.
-Todd
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This is amusing. Now we get to see who actually clicked the link, and who posted blindly without bothering to read the article.
-Todd
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Nope, I meant what I said. The receiver limits the quality of any other component (I don't consider the speakers a "component" as such). If you have a crappy receiver, then it really won't matter what you have for speakers. However, I definitely agree with you that the speakers then limit the sound coming out of the receiver. Crappy speakers, and it doesn't matter what you have for a receiver or anything else.
But I believe that you need to consider the receiver/amp/speakers all together. While the speakers are the endpoint for the sound in your system, all three pieces are bottlenecks. You can't buy reference speakers and a Radio Shack receiver and expect to get great sound. And you can't buy Radio Shack speakers and an expensive THX receiver either. Don't make the mistake of believing that either of the bottlenecks in your audio system is more important than the other.
-Todd
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I have a full set of Cambridge SoundWorks speakers in my setup right now. I used their MovieWorks 5.1 speaker system (large center channel, matched pair for left & right, matched pair for left and right surrounds, and a BassCube 10), and added an extra pair of surrounds for the left and right rear surround channels, for a full 6.1 setup. The entire set cost me about $1600, however, so that might fall a little out of your range. They do have less expensive sets, however, and I've never had a problem with their sound quality.
As far as a receiver goes, I'm using a B&K AVR307 system. It's THX EX certified, and it has more inputs/outputs than I can possibly use. Plus it's upgradeable for future standards (you can swap one of the logic boards and upgrade the software). And it has a serial port for hooking into a home automation system. But that piece was about $3500 alone. I decided that I'd rather spend the money on a really good receiver, since the receiver is going to limit the quality of any other component in the system.
-Todd
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I remember several years back when another "cracker" from Romania was causing problems for Undernet. Attacking servers, attacking services. Problem was that Romania has no laws regarding computer crimes, at least none worth mentioning.
However, the person in question made the mistake of attacking the norman.ok.us server, which is/was hosted by the National Severe Storms Lab. Attacking a government server is a big no-no. It was enough for one of the opers to contact a friend with CERT and get Romania's internet traffic blackholed. Sent to the bitbucket as it hit the major backbones. It was a quiet day, and suddenly there weren't any more problems from that person again.
So why not go through CERT again? If Romania's not going to respond to problems from its citizens, then they should be treated just like an ISP who won't do anything about spammers. They get the death penalty, except this time it's the Internet Death Penalty, rather than the Usenet version.
-Todd
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LANL has a lot more security problems than that. I did a stint over there, and the security was deplorable. There were lots of people who had computer accounts that shouldn't have (including me). Password security wasn't enforced, shadowed passwords weren't being used. It was laughable. And the physical security wasn't too much better in most places. Most of the medium security places (ie. not the plutonium facility) didn't bother to check laptops and bags and such going in and out.
But I ramble.
-Todd
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Anyone else find it interesting that the "high" bid on the first auction was exactly $75k, which happened to also be the reserve, and was placed by the person who was selling the second auction (simpsonseller). And then his bid on the first auction gets cancelled saying that he didn't think anyone had 75k to spend on games (which sounds more like something the seller would say), and then the first auction immediately gets cancelled. And the second auction gets cancelled at the same time.
Like a lot of people called it, looks like it was fake from the start.
-Todd
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This is a very easy issue to address. Your ISP has the right to anything they want to to the files you store on their server. They can delete them, read them, modify them, or leave them alone. You, as a customer, have exactly one right. You can take your money elsewhere.
Sure, you can report them to the Better Business Bureau, but that just amounts to the same thing, customers leaving (or never signing on). Sure, you could try and take them to court for breaching their own policies, but they can pretty much change their policies whenever they like for whatever reason they like. What it boils down to is that you have very few protections that apply when it comes to dealing with a private company. It's been said before, but it's worth repeating that things like the First Amendment don't apply when you're dealing with a private company in this manner.
All you have is the power of your money. Use it.
-Todd
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Sort of...
I just got a eLink device (RiM 850 pager) that runs Yahoo. Mail, messenger, WML browser, plus the RiM built-ins like calendar and address book. Flat rate of $35 a month. So far, it seems pretty cool. My only wish is that AOL would wake up and allow AIM to interoperate with other messaging platforms, like Yahoo.
But the point of this story is that there are value-adds that Yahoo can provide that are worth paying for. I'm going to be using this for work instead of a pager. It's much more useful, and cheaper (as far as I've seen).
-Todd
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What happened to the driving force behind the quality of open source: "thousands of eyes go over the code to find bugs". ?
Thousands of eyes is great. I'm sure thousands of eyes found lots of bugs. But nothing compares to live load. This is something I learned when working on larger systems, like the ones at AOL. You can comb the code as much as you want, and test it for weeks. There will still be bugs that only a live system will show. What I would guess is that these large Linux shops "test cycles" include things like running live load on the systems, and pushing them harder than they can be pushed on someone's desktop.
Also, you're way off with comparing this to MS. It's not as if you can't pull a copy of the latest test kernel and run it on your boxen and find bugs and report them. Linus is not saying that these large Linux houses get to test the kernel exclusively. All he's saying is that that's where he's expecting to find most of the last minute bugs.
The Linux community should consider itself lucky to have large shops that will test new releases internally. I have seen so much code that has been "released" by companies that are not known for bad software, that has completely fallen apart under live load. It tends to be true that the more load we put on a system, the more obscure the bugs we found. But as obscure as the bugs were, they were showstoppers to a large system. And these were things that the software companies couldn't find themselves in their QA labs because they just didn't have access to the load that we were placing on the systems.
-Todd
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The service should shine for big downloads, but be rather poor for highly "chatty" stuff, with many request-response pairs. Loading web pages with many small objects would be rather disappointing, I should think. Checking POP3 email, if there are many small messages, would be pretty poor.
You are absolutely correct. I know this from personal experience. See my other 2 posts under this article for some calculations and timings.
-Todd
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