This is a -horrible- idea, and the RFC describes why, in at least three different ways.
Some of the key points, in very brief: * The owner of a server has no control over what domains choose to point what names at his IP address. * A TLD is a global designation, but there is no global consensus on what constitutes 'pornographic' or 'unsuitable' material.
Even if there is no perfect system, the one proposed in the RFC (hooks to allow browser software to consult your choice of 'rating authority') seems to be much more promising than this TLD nonsense.
As the RFC points out, if you create 'adult and non-adult' TLDs, how do you decide (on a global scale) what it means to be 'adult' or 'non-adult' when countries, religions and communities have such incredibly divergent views of what they should be? For any answer to work, it -must- take this into consideration, and provide a mechanism for different communities to select different filtering criteria.
The persecution of people accessing some adult TLD is potentially a serious issue, or perhaps not, but it's the technical issues that make adult TLDs not only pointless, but inherently dangerous.
The owner of a computer has **NO CONTROL** over what DNS names are pointed at their IP address. That means that there is no way you can prosecute an adult-themed site for being referred to by a non-adult TLD, or prevent an adult TLD from being pointed at a non-adult site for DoS purposes.
Fair enough, although depending on how they do their accounting, every image might count as a separate 'hit'. (In fact, given the seemingly high value of that number, this may very well be the case.)
I based the 50k off of some admittedly mostly text sites, just for a 'back of envelope' attempt to see what sort of bandwidth that number of hits might represent.
Wouldn't current methods trivially circumvent this?
1) Spamhouse uses viruses to own assorted desktops (just like they do now). 2) Instead of just using those boxes as oen relays (like the do now) they first have them 'pay' this postage.
Actually that's 3.5 million 'hits' per month, assuming the data is accurate. Given the nature of the site, most of the hits every month were likely to be from the same 'users'.
If a hit involved on average a 50k download, that's 167GB per month. If all hits came evenly over the month but only during a 12 hour period in any given day, that's 130kB/s or just about 1Mbps.
Demanding over $9000 per month for bandwidth that general broadband users get for closer to $60 sounds pretty unreasonable to me. Colocation facilities only charge a few hundred dollars per month for much fancier services.
In any case, the pattern of 'offer service for free, wait for customer to become dependant, then demand gobs of money on threat of removing the service' sure sounds like extortion to me. The most similar marketing strategy I know of would be crack dealers giving out free samples...
AT&T and MCI (and Sprint) are long distance companies.
Unless the local Bell-equivalents share their last-mile wiring with them, they cannot offer local phone service, because they have no physical connection to the customer.
rot-13 was an simple cypher used to 'encrypt' spoilers and possibly offensive material in Usenet posts. It worked by converting each letter of the (latin) alphabet to it's numerical equivalent (a=1, b=2,...,z=26), adding 13, subtracting 26 if the result was larger than 26, then converting back to a letter. (ROTating the letter thirteen 'spaces').
"Hello World" -> "Uryyb Jbeyq"
triple-DES is a more modern encryption scheme still in use today.
The humor comes from the fact that applying rot-13 twice results in the exact original text, so saying that the Internet uses 'double rot-13 by default' is just noting that it's completely unencrypted but in a way that makes it sound like a real encryption scheme.
It really was quite an amusing post... unlike this one.
"I guess I will never find the support or help now"
From the announcement itself:
Our website will stay up, and
our mailing lists at lists.freeswan.org will continue to provide a forum for users to support one another. We expect that FreeS/WAN and its derivatives will be widely deployed for some time to come.
That the original group of developers is bowing out has, really, little to no implications for your ability to find support.
"Companines [sic] have an incentive to keep working on their products."
Not if they go out of business, change business models, or decide that a particular product is no longer profitable.
In all of these cases, if you depended on access to and updates for their software, you would be SOL.
With OSS, you get the source code and have the freedom to recompile it to new targets and make whatever small patches are neccessary to keep it running. If it's important enough to your company (or to you as a personal user) you can take over the maintainence yourself.
Well, let's see what hardware RAID options are out there right now...
There's the Apple Xserve: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ where 1TB costs $5,999.00
RAIDzone also makes reasonably affordable NAS and SAN RAID systems: http://www.raidzone.com/ (although it looks like you have to call for pricing now).
Most of the 'big boys' of storage cost slightly more.
You could also try to roll your own, but your mileage would definately vary.
Yes. It is as wrong as if a TV commercial could prevent me from changing the channel, turning on the radio, or going to the bathroom while it was playing.
A full-screen advertisement as herein described consumes my bandwidth without asking (potentially forcing me to pay more to my ISP), hijacks my entire computer interface (which usually does much more than just web browsing).
I have little problem with net advertising in general, as long as it respects my control of my property. A website that requires you to click-through a page of advertising may be annoying if you are in a hurry, but is completely reasonable and up front. A website that silently loads a high-res movie in the background, then takes over your entire screen when you try to leave, is an abomination.
And even then it'll probably be a few days before IBM can look over whatever SCO gives them tomorrow, and possibly some unspecified period after that before information about what 'it' is starts leaking out.
I believe I understand his point perfectly, including the use of "if".
The original post suggests that the adjective "ill-fated" is inappropriate, because it implies that the show met a fate it didn't deserve, and suggests instead "doomed", implying that it had no chance.
That sentence basically says "If the show hadn't sucked (was more than juvenile), we could call it ill-fated". The implication is that we shouldn't call it ill-fated, because it was not "more than juvenile Saturday morning" fare.
I respectfully disagree with these blanket statements and enquire what criteria were used to support these opinions.
"...but no one can be bothered to do a good science fiction series."
What are your criteria for a science fiction series to be "good"?
Personally I thought Firefly was an excellent series. It had interesting characters with complex motivations and interactions, good pacing, beautiful sets, gratuitous violence, and an intriguing and believeable universe. I'm somewhat baffled as to how anyone could seriously characterize it as "juvenile Saturday morning" given all of these elements.
If you're not just a troll, perhaps you'd like to discuss this further?
"your TCP/IP logs and ISP logs would show that i downloaded something from you or vice versa."
The point to this network seems to be that, while the logs will show that packets were transferred from IP address A to IP address B, that doesn't imply that address A was the original source, or that address B was the final destination. Additionally, since it appears that the data is encrypted to the final destination, the packets have no intrinsic value to any of the intermediary nodes.
The technical failing, as I see it, is that a majority of these nodes have a single physical network connection through their ISP, so it would be theoretically trivial to determine if any node is in fact a net producer or net consumer by simply looking at the differences between inbound and outbound traffic. The way they draw their graphs implies that traffic to different neighbors is somehow distinct and that it's difficult to monitor all of your connections at once, which isn't the case at all.
The moral/ethical failing is that they've created this system for the express purpose of committing a crime (copyright infringement) and state such up front. I can't off the top of my head think of any particularly useful legal uses for this system, and none are offered by the creators.
Where something like the ant algorithm -could- be interesting (and legal) would be for routing connections between wireless or other mobile nodes.
I used to agree completely. My (perhaps eternally) unbuild Battlebot was going to incorporate a lot more onboard intelligence than is normally seen. If nothing else, it would hopefully cut down on "driver error" losses (of which I saw many), but I was still going to refuse to call it a robot on general principles.
However, writing this post led me to try to find an authoritative definition for the term 'robot'. The following is typical:
"A robot is a machine designed to execute one or more tasks repeatedly, with speed and precision."
There is no mention in any of the accepted definitions of autonomy, which means that yes, even a simple RC car can accurately be called a 'robot'. (And yes, it sounds cooler when you do.)
The(sic) arent(sic) in the unix business by any mesure and i(sic) cant(sic) remember one single product that even touches unix coming from MS.
You may have missed the following product they call "Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX"...
LINK
From their 'Product Overview':
The Interix technology provides a UNIX environment that runs on top the Windows kernel, enabling UNIX application and scripts to run natively on the Windows platform alongside Windows applications. With this capability, you can continue to get value out of your UNIX scripts and applications--simply reuse them on Windows.
The remaining thousands of votes were thus never actually recounted properly
As some of my sibling posts point out, this is incorrect and extensive analysis was in fact performed after the fact. I apologize for my ignorance and suggest that the curious follow the links that more informed posters have provided.
My other comments, while less directly relevant, stand on their own merits or lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a -horrible- idea, and the RFC describes why, in at least three different ways.
Some of the key points, in very brief:
* The owner of a server has no control over what domains choose to point what names at his IP address.
* A TLD is a global designation, but there is no global consensus on what constitutes 'pornographic' or 'unsuitable' material.
Even if there is no perfect system, the one proposed in the RFC (hooks to allow browser software to consult your choice of 'rating authority') seems to be much more promising than this TLD nonsense.
As the RFC points out, if you create 'adult and non-adult' TLDs, how do you decide (on a global scale) what it means to be 'adult' or 'non-adult' when countries, religions and communities have such incredibly divergent views of what they should be? For any answer to work, it -must- take this into consideration, and provide a mechanism for different communities to select different filtering criteria.
The persecution of people accessing some adult TLD is potentially a serious issue, or perhaps not, but it's the technical issues that make adult TLDs not only pointless, but inherently dangerous.
The owner of a computer has **NO CONTROL** over what DNS names are pointed at their IP address. That means that there is no way you can prosecute an adult-themed site for being referred to by a non-adult TLD, or prevent an adult TLD from being pointed at a non-adult site for DoS purposes.
Cool! I'd forgotten about this handy trick.
As an arbitrary example of using it on another repeating irrational number (useful in that it there are fewer 9s involved):
What's 0.151515... ?
100r = 15.151515...
100r - r = 15
99r = 15
r = 15 / 99 = 5 / 33
Spifftastic!
Fair enough, although depending on how they do their accounting, every image might count as a separate 'hit'. (In fact, given the seemingly high value of that number, this may very well be the case.)
I based the 50k off of some admittedly mostly text sites, just for a 'back of envelope' attempt to see what sort of bandwidth that number of hits might represent.
Here's another that just popped up in my sidebar:
Spammers target home PCs
This article is a decent brief overview of what I was referring to: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031205S0009
Wouldn't current methods trivially circumvent this?
1) Spamhouse uses viruses to own assorted desktops (just like they do now).
2) Instead of just using those boxes as oen relays (like the do now) they first have them 'pay' this postage.
Actually that's 3.5 million 'hits' per month, assuming the data is accurate. Given the nature of the site, most of the hits every month were likely to be from the same 'users'.
If a hit involved on average a 50k download, that's 167GB per month. If all hits came evenly over the month but only during a 12 hour period in any given day, that's 130kB/s or just about 1Mbps.
Demanding over $9000 per month for bandwidth that general broadband users get for closer to $60 sounds pretty unreasonable to me. Colocation facilities only charge a few hundred dollars per month for much fancier services.
In any case, the pattern of 'offer service for free, wait for customer to become dependant, then demand gobs of money on threat of removing the service' sure sounds like extortion to me. The most similar marketing strategy I know of would be crack dealers giving out free samples...
Only if you tell it to remove them (by, for example, commiting the changes).
OpenOffice 1.1 supports change tracking in a reasonably MS Word compatible manner.
AT&T and MCI (and Sprint) are long distance companies.
Unless the local Bell-equivalents share their last-mile wiring with them, they cannot offer local phone service, because they have no physical connection to the customer.
rot-13 was an simple cypher used to 'encrypt' spoilers and possibly offensive material in Usenet posts. It worked by converting each letter of the (latin) alphabet to it's numerical equivalent (a=1, b=2, ... ,z=26), adding 13, subtracting 26 if the result was larger than 26, then converting back to a letter. (ROTating the letter thirteen 'spaces').
"Hello World" -> "Uryyb Jbeyq"
triple-DES is a more modern encryption scheme still in use today.
The humor comes from the fact that applying rot-13 twice results in the exact original text, so saying that the Internet uses 'double rot-13 by default' is just noting that it's completely unencrypted but in a way that makes it sound like a real encryption scheme.
It really was quite an amusing post... unlike this one.
From the announcement itself:
That the original group of developers is bowing out has, really, little to no implications for your ability to find support.
Not if they go out of business, change business models, or decide that a particular product is no longer profitable.
In all of these cases, if you depended on access to and updates for their software, you would be SOL.
With OSS, you get the source code and have the freedom to recompile it to new targets and make whatever small patches are neccessary to keep it running. If it's important enough to your company (or to you as a personal user) you can take over the maintainence yourself.
The parent is alluding to this fact.
Well, let's see what hardware RAID options are out there right now...
There's the Apple Xserve: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
where 1TB costs $5,999.00
RAIDzone also makes reasonably affordable NAS and SAN RAID systems: http://www.raidzone.com/
(although it looks like you have to call for pricing now).
Most of the 'big boys' of storage cost slightly more.
You could also try to roll your own, but your mileage would definately vary.
"people are Balkanizing the FOSS world over the finer points of dogma, rather than building a common framework in which we can all thrive."
Amen.
WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY.
I used their (NVIDIAs) provided installer and it appeared to happily create and install 2.6-compatible drivers just like it did for 2.4.x.
I haven't done any in-depth benchmarking but they seem to be fully functional, and I certainly didn't 'mod' anything.
Really? Is Google bigger than Lehman Brothers, whom SCO just recently threatened on this issue?
a rticle.php?story=200402171 13800806
http://www.lehman.com/
http://www.groklaw.net/
Not all 'major users of Linux' are Internet companies...
"Is this so wrong on the net?"
Yes. It is as wrong as if a TV commercial could prevent me from changing the channel, turning on the radio, or going to the bathroom while it was playing.
A full-screen advertisement as herein described consumes my bandwidth without asking (potentially forcing me to pay more to my ISP), hijacks my entire computer interface (which usually does much more than just web browsing).
I have little problem with net advertising in general, as long as it respects my control of my property. A website that requires you to click-through a page of advertising may be annoying if you are in a hurry, but is completely reasonable and up front. A website that silently loads a high-res movie in the background, then takes over your entire screen when you try to leave, is an abomination.
And even then it'll probably be a few days before IBM can look over whatever SCO gives them tomorrow, and possibly some unspecified period after that before information about what 'it' is starts leaking out.
Breath-holding is likely to be ill-advised.
I believe I understand his point perfectly, including the use of "if".
The original post suggests that the adjective "ill-fated" is inappropriate, because it implies that the show met a fate it didn't deserve, and suggests instead "doomed", implying that it had no chance.
That sentence basically says "If the show hadn't sucked (was more than juvenile), we could call it ill-fated". The implication is that we shouldn't call it ill-fated, because it was not "more than juvenile Saturday morning" fare.
I respectfully disagree with these blanket statements and enquire what criteria were used to support these opinions.
What did you think he meant?
"...but no one can be bothered to do a good science fiction series."
What are your criteria for a science fiction series to be "good"?
Personally I thought Firefly was an excellent series. It had interesting characters with complex motivations and interactions, good pacing, beautiful sets, gratuitous violence, and an intriguing and believeable universe. I'm somewhat baffled as to how anyone could seriously characterize it as "juvenile Saturday morning" given all of these elements.
If you're not just a troll, perhaps you'd like to discuss this further?
"your TCP/IP logs and ISP logs would show that i downloaded something from you or vice versa."
The point to this network seems to be that, while the logs will show that packets were transferred from IP address A to IP address B, that doesn't imply that address A was the original source, or that address B was the final destination. Additionally, since it appears that the data is encrypted to the final destination, the packets have no intrinsic value to any of the intermediary nodes.
The technical failing, as I see it, is that a majority of these nodes have a single physical network connection through their ISP, so it would be theoretically trivial to determine if any node is in fact a net producer or net consumer by simply looking at the differences between inbound and outbound traffic. The way they draw their graphs implies that traffic to different neighbors is somehow distinct and that it's difficult to monitor all of your connections at once, which isn't the case at all.
The moral/ethical failing is that they've created this system for the express purpose of committing a crime (copyright infringement) and state such up front. I can't off the top of my head think of any particularly useful legal uses for this system, and none are offered by the creators.
Where something like the ant algorithm -could- be interesting (and legal) would be for routing connections between wireless or other mobile nodes.
I used to agree completely.
My (perhaps eternally) unbuild Battlebot was going to incorporate a lot more onboard intelligence than is normally seen. If nothing else, it would hopefully cut down on "driver error" losses (of which I saw many), but I was still going to refuse to call it a robot on general principles.
However, writing this post led me to try to find an authoritative definition for the term 'robot'. The following is typical:
"A robot is a machine designed to execute one or more tasks repeatedly, with speed and precision."
There is no mention in any of the accepted definitions of autonomy, which means that yes, even a simple RC car can accurately be called a 'robot'. (And yes, it sounds cooler when you do.)
You may have missed the following product they call "Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX"... LINK
From their 'Product Overview':
As some of my sibling posts point out, this is incorrect and extensive analysis was in fact performed after the fact. I apologize for my ignorance and suggest that the curious follow the links that more informed posters have provided.
My other comments, while less directly relevant, stand on their own merits or lack thereof.