This quote about "ultra-rural" Grant County PUD is somewhat misleading:
"In fact, in ultra-rural Grant County, WA, where users of the County's FTTH system have affordable access to speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, bandwidth usage has jumped more than 600 percent and upstream usage actually exceeds downstream usage. Why? The County believes that small businesses are sending substantially more information to the Internet than they are downloading, and gamers are vastly increasing their real-time usage."
While it's true that the users are getting 100mbps access, they are *paying* for only 1mbps access. The PUD is simply too lazy (or incompetent) to limit the actual rates. Now that the PUD is running out of cash to continue rolling out the program they are still fighting any efforts on the part of service providers to actually rate-limit connections and use that to provide quality of service (and enough cash-flow to the PUD to pay for the program).
The other problems with public power doing broadband is their bureaucratic nature. These are not business people but salaried workers who are accustomed to a business model that does not include competition or the risk of going bankrupt. They have been tutored in a regulated monopoly environment in which the "bottom line" can often be whatever they want it to be. Here in Grant County they have apparently (it's hard to get a straight answer) raised the electric power rates to help cover the fiber rollout costs. This has enraged the agricultural interests who feel, with some justification, that those who will benefit most from fiber should pay the most to roll it out.
Additionally, the PUD here has entered into questionable contracts with favored service providers. There is at the present time an investigation into these dealings being undertaken by an "independent" Seattle-area lawyer. The word "independent" is in quotes because the attorney doing the investigation told me he is acting as the attorney for the PUD Commissioners with all the secrecy a client-attorney relationship can imply. Whether the results of this investigation, which could be politically damaging, will be released to the public is "entirely up to the PUD Commissioners", he said.
The Grant County PUD is hardly a shining example of local-control broadband. The PUD controls two hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and will spend something over $200 million in their fiber project (no one yet knows the real costs). This is big money no matter how you look at it and allegations of sweetheart deals to special interests abound.
Broadband is expensive no matter who does it and no matter what a high-power lawyer in Washington, DC says. Trying to do it with a community effort might be successful or it might not be. There are many pitfalls and with so much money involved there is always the possibility of corruption and waste.
A "non-disclosure agreement" is a contract and the terms of the contract determine what can and cannot be disclosed by one (or both) of the parties. I haven't seen the terms of the SCO non-disclosure agreement but whether or not it requires you to pay them regardless of your ability to reduce your liability by removing or re-writing the code would depend upon how the agreement is written. It seems to me, and IAMAL, that SCO's claims to be "damaged" is reduced if SCO refuses to let anyone know what the damage is, let alone fix it.
Let's take an injury claim. If you help me paint my house and fall off the ladder and get hurt, then I am probably responsible. However, if you won't let me know what injuries you incurred then I cannot repair the damage. If you then take me to court and demand punitive damages to teach me a lesson for not fixing you, I can claim that you never gave me the chance to help.
If you make me sign a non-disclosure agreement that stipulates that I must pay you regardless of whether I could easily remedy the damage, then that seems pretty unfair too. In the case of our painting injury, you could show me that your arm was broken but then claim (with supporting "expert" testimony, that only a heart replacement would truly fix you up and by signing the non-disclosure I would be obligated to pay for that. Nevermind that an emergency room doc could set the arm and cast it and you'd be fine in six weeks.
Any company that would sign such a non-disclosure agreement (if it were couched in the terms you describe) would deserve what it gets.
It seems to me that just the act of refusing to allow anyone to see the infringing material casts SCO in the light of trying to maximize damage to their intellectual property rights. In other words, rather than allowing it to be fixed, they want to take it to court and assign a monetary amount to the "damage" and add punitive consequences.
Is it kernel? Is it GNU extensions/utilities? What if I use 2.0 (pre IBM)??? By not telling us which parts infringe SCO is cynically allowing the base of infringing use to expand presumably to enlarge its collections under tort.
In addition, by not allowing the community to fix the problem, SCO is basically showing that their intent was never to stop the IP infringment but to collect damages. Seems to me that this would be pretty damaging in court to have to admit that the infringing could have been easily stopped however that would interrupt their hoped-for revenue stream.
At least not until you have a reliable data system. The local PUD here decided to do video and they have gotten themselves into a quagmire with allegations of mismanagement and worse. Video over fiber seems easy technically (just multicast it) but it turned out to be a nightmare. And expensive! It will suck the life out of your project if you try to do it in the beginning.
If you have only a couple hundred acres you should be able to design a fiber network using relatively inexpensive switches. I recommend using Squid as a cheap way to ensure that bandwidth isn't hogged (a T1 is not that fast when serving 100 "high bandwidth" customers) by a few very active downloaders. Use NAT to keep costs down and stop enterprising home office users from installing their own servers. This will slow P2P down too.
But whatever you do, don't get involved in running VOIP or video over this system until you thoroughly understand all the political and technical details.
SCO has threatened to cut off IBM's licensing of Unix in the current $1B lawsuit but Sun has a perpetual license to its Unix IP. The acquisition of Sun by IBM might derail any outcome of the SCO/IBM litigation that would otherwise have resulted in serious consequences for AIX products. With Solaris available as a quick fix for any AIX licensing problems, IBM is poised to shrug it off and forge ahead claiming licensing from Sun IP covers AIX.
Furthermore, the acquisition of Sun would put IBM in the catbird seat of *nix vendors with AIX, Solaris and Linux products for practically any business niche. This acquisition, under the current circumstances, makes a lot of sense but I'd certainly hate to be in the Sun channel if it happens; IBM would almost certainly cut them off in favor of internal sales and marketing.
Expect to see a lot more ex-Sun shops turn into Linux shops if this goes through.
This is an entertaining read even though it's dated. The single thread in Unix Haters seems to me to be, "Unix is not as good as whatever-I-used-last". Whether that was VMS or LispM or RT11, etc. I can imagine turning into a curmudgeon over being forced to move from an OS that I understood well to one that I didn't; heck, I had to move from Unix to DOS and then spent years trying to make it work more like Unix (4dos, DesqView, etc.). When Linux appeared I jumped on it like a shot. It's only human nature to prefer what you know over what you don't yet know. And Unix is surely an easy target with all those arcane commands. But Apple has also shown that a Unix-like OS can be made to work pretty well in a modern computing environment. Unix endures because it seems to be adaptable to almost any idea of what computing "should be".
A patent from a high-tech company that isn't some lame attempt to steal ideas from the past and/or something that was so obvious to everyone else that no one ever thought to patent it. I am so friggin sick of patents that blatantly try to subvert progress in the name of ripping off the community that this one from Apple actually comes as a breath of fresh air. I have no idea how useful this device will be but at least it appears no one else has ever built one before.
The only issue was to have the City send notifications out to our neighbors when we first applied for a zoning varience. It wasn't a big deal but there are no covenants where this house is located so we only had to deal with the city people. We do consulting and mostly we go to client's offices although the occasional client does come here. We use the entire top floor of the house, have 3 full-time and 2 part-time employees. We do get a fair number of deliveries but no one has complained. One important thing is to try to keep a relatively low profile. Don't park in your neighbors' driveway, don't let your employees speed through the residential area (and if they do and you see them come down hard on them). In short, be a good neighbor. If your neighbors complain you are likely to have to move your business. I also recommend you incorporate as an S-Corp. I did this myself with forms from a bookstore and it worked out fine. We also have an accountant to check that we are doing things right. We stay here because the house is lakefront and it makes a great office but one more employee and we will have to find larger quarters.
This movie was panned by critics when it came out 20 years ago but was remarkably true to the characters. Robin Williams played Popeye and there was Bluto and the burger-loving character (heck, I can't remember his name). But the star of the show was Shelley Duvall as Olive Oil. Shelley should have won an Oscar for this role. She was the cartoon Olive Oil brought to life; voice, figure (or lack of it), mannerism... she had it all down pat and every scene she was in was enjoyable to those of us who grew up watching the cartoons.
Plus the location of the filming was remarkable in its ability to seem other-worldish. I have it on tape somewhere in my collection and haven't watched it in years but it's my favorite "unsung movie".
The least expensive Linux environment I could find on RH's site was $179 for the WS version. The least expensive "server" was $349 for their "basic edition" of ES. This differentiation between the server and workstation formats is a trend I see throughout the commercial distros. SuSE has gone so far as to remove functionality from its basic offering (version 8.1) in what seems to me to be an effort to direct us towards buying their spendy "server" product ($800+)
RedHat's pricing for the Itanium processors was not given (it's determined by OEMs), but a small blurb announced that the (cheap) version 7.3 for the Itanium has been discontinued!!!
While I can't fault these corporations for at least trying to turn a profit, the trend has caused me to step back and re-evaluate the use of Linux for very small business file servers. The last four servers I built have been freeBSD and it looks very much like that will continue until they, too, decide that they can gouge the customers with insanely high prices for what has been, up until recently, a "free operating system".
The Grant County PUD was one of the first in Washington State to install Fiber in this mostly-rural and agricultural county on the "dry side" of the Cascade Mountains. There are about 10 ISPs in the county (including ours. The PUD is the wholesale provider of bandwidth and the local ISPs are retail. Every ISP sells essentially the same service and almost no one is dual-homed because the competition has driven the prices down to the point where no one can afford more than one uplink.We have essentially uncapped bandwidth on 100Mbps fiber for $23 a month (non-static IP).
However there are political shifts in the wind ahead. The farmers in this ag area are up in arms over the idea that their power bills should be capitalizing the fiber services. Unable to realize the benefits to them long-term (like their kids finding jobs here rather than in Seattle), they want the PUD to finance the fiber without raising electricity rates. With the fiber rollout only about 20% completed, it remains to be seen as to whether the rest of the county can be connected before things change radically.
We all expect this cheap bandwidth to end as the Public Utility District (whose commissioners are elected) wrestles with a way to continue the roll-out while still keeping the politically powerful farmers happy. If the PUD doesn't do it, no one (certainly not the telephone company) will. But will the rate payers, the majority of whom do not understand any benefits to them long-term, allow this to continue? Stay tuned...
First of all, if it fits a plus b plus c that's 3 out of 5 and that's "most" in practically anyone's book (not, apparently, yours). And it's not unreasonable to believe that it meets (d) ("orbits a star") as well.
Simply stating that it can't be a planet because it may not fit 2 of your 5 wholly-invented criteria is specious. Claiming that the moon (Luna) orbits the earth is not accurate either. It's just as easy to claim (and show mathematically) that the earth and Luna both modify each other's orbits to a significant extent. Therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, each orbits the other.
So a pretty good case can be made (and has been made) for the claim that earth/luna is a binary planet relationship just on these large mutual perturbations of orbits alone. And then, of course, it's 4.5 times the diameter of the 800km offered as your minimum diameter for a "planet".
Is it possible that extraterrestrials, putting around the solar system in their flying saucers, might even now be consulting their "Solar System on $5 Credits A Day" (or, "Earth through the Back Door") and reading about the "binary planets Earth/Luna"?
SCO (using its former name "Caldera") alleges that IBM took its IP and applied that to AIX and then took that and applied it to Linux. What they will have to prove in court is that there really is SCO/Unix IP in AIX that could possibly be applied to Linux. And then they will have to prove that the advances in Linux (which they claim to be as a result of IBM's "tortious" misappropriation of their IP) were not as a result of Caldera's involvement with Linux and specifically with UnitedLinux.
If IBM was responsible for the advances, what possible use was Caldera in the UnitedLinux camp? Their only contribution could have been IP since they had no viable distro and no marketing and, frankly, not much credibility.
If Caldera was contributing to SMP, journalling, etc. then they have a difficult case to win. If they weren't, then why were they involved with UL in the first place?
This shouldn't be difficult to show given that IBM's contributions are open source. What will be interesting is discovering how much of SCO's IP might have been directly borrowed from the GPL.
"Half the problem here is that we bill for bandwidth in the wrong way. By billing on traffic, we open ourselves to exactly this sort of problem - it would be like billing for water consumption based on pressure (rather than volume)."
This doesn't make sense to me. Pressure is like access... nothing flows until you make it flow. It is just the potential for flow. Volume of water flowing (think of it as molecules=packets) is analogous to packets flowing and is a much fairer way of charging for bandwidth since the person pays for what they used (exactly like they pay for the water they use).
"The reason ISPs bill per megabyte is so they can bill multiple customers for the same piece of infrastructure... and at the same time, over-subscribe that piece of infrastructure."
I think you have this backwards. When you charge for a connection ("access") then you can bill multiple customers because you can safely assume that not all of them will be utilizing their access fully. We had an upstream provider that had 19 PVCs on one T1 connection upstream... and was charging every one of its downstream customers for a T1! This is what is meant by "oversubscription". How, exactly, would you double bill for a measured amount of packets?
According to your theory the grocery store should only charge the first customer because then his "infrastructure" costs would be met.
"Strangely enough, paying a fixed fee based on the size of your connection is where the whole thing started. Paying per byte is a relatively recent (several years, but still recent) concept, thought up by greedy providers who realised they can charge many customers for something that is essentially free."
Bandwidth measurement was (and still is) more expensive to count and to bill than simple access. A simple connection is simple; you just provision the PVC and start billing. That's why everyone started out that way. Once the technology was in place (cheaply enough) to allow ISPs to measure bandwidth, then - and only then - could they charge for it.
I don't know how you can think that it's "free". Is your transportation free even though you've paid off your car? ISPs have to charge enough to pay their engineers, their billing people, their sales people, plus have enough to cover capital expenses for new equipment (which the customers will demand because their needs increase). Plus the ISP has to pay its own uplink charges for bandwidth (usually metered). And then, of course, there's the interest payments on the loans taken out to buy the original equipment. No, you're dead wrong. Bandwidth is not "essentially free".
"Take a look at the profit levels of some of the bigger providers in your country. Here in Australia, Telstra, Optus and Connect all report multi-million (and in many cases billion) dollar profits. Nobody can tell me that the core connectivity of the Internet isn't currently a profitable business."
I don't suppose the plethora of bankrupt US providers would convince you otherwise, either. The profit margin for an ISP is razor thin and getting thinner as providers drop prices in an attempt to gain customer base (and profitability). Even AOL is struggling. No ISP in the US is making billion dollar net profits.
I think your understanding of economics is as weak as your understanding of pressure and volume.
This would be a bigger target ...
on
The Space Elevator
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· Score: 1, Redundant
than the World Trade Center. Imagine planeloads of terrorists and religious extremists trying to make their point by colliding with the "elevator". Heck, for that matter imagine some unwitting student pilot in a Cessna.
When I was consulting for an ISP they received an email that identified a backdoor on their commercial ISP accounting software. This allowed anyone who knew about the backdoor to access user information including credit card data. The email included credit card information on about 50 of the ISP's subscribers just to prove the claim. We took steps to ensure that no one could gain access to that application from the 'Net but it was an eye-opener.
Patents are supposed to be "nonobvious" so just how innovative is it to symbolize deleting a file by using a garbage can icon? Even if Xerox (from which Apple borrowed the desktop idea) hadn't already had such an icon already, the patent is specious simply on the "nonobvious" grounds.
We used squid as a filter on our local school district's 'Net connection for years. In order to make it work right we set the Cisco border router to not allow any connections to port 80 from any machine other than the squid box. Then we set up the squid box as the default gw for all the machines, set the squid box to port forward port 80 to port 3128 and "viola!".
For the first few weeks we just looked through the logs of what the middle school boys were trying to access and added them to the filter list. It was simply amazing how these kids could find porn! But after a few months we got most of it into the filter list (a *long* list). Then we set squid up to notify one of the teachers whenever anyone went to a denied site. The teacher could just saunter over to the offending computer (every computer in the school is reverse DNS'ed) and tap the kid on the shoulder. Zero tolerance for porn in the classroom meant that even middle schoolers finally learned.
Of course, a school district is not the same as an ISP much less an entire country. Filtering out a 12-year-old's access to porn is important (IMHO). Filtering out an adult's access to anything is Orwellian.
But since squid *does* work, I'm just glad no one in Oz has noticed.
"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
I suppose it depends upon the vantage point of the people involved in a collision. Which would you rather be hit by: a Ford Explorer or a Honda CRZ?
There are also issues of a smaller car being more maneuverable. My wife once avoided a serious accident by being able to swerve her VW Rabbit very quickly to safely pass a camper shell that blew off from the vehicle in front of her on the freeway.
While larger and heavier vehicles absorb collision stress better than those of less mass, it's likely that a larger proportion of lighter vehicles on the road could reduce injuries by simply reducing the collision loads.
Fair enough (regarding the cabal and the rules). So why not simply tell everyone what he did and who was pissed? It still looks like it is the same type of secrecy that you'd find in a large corporation rather than an open-source development team. And I don't think/. spread this "without any basis". As a member of the open-source community you cannot expect to be able to maintain a "you don't dare question us" attitude. It's not FUD to publicly question a set of actions or to publicly worry about the direction of a project.
I suppose if you define "FUD" as "questions I don't want to hear and don't want to answer" you're right. Otherwise this article seems pertinent and germane to a subject that purports to be "open source". If any developer is truly free to port code to a project, then every developer who does so needs to have a copy of the rule book. If Matt's actions were contrary to a secret set of rules that only you and a few other select people understand, then how can any other developer work for your group with any sense of security? The alternative is to assume that there is an elite cabal whom one must never piss off regardless of whether they're right or wrong. The only question then is who they are.
If you want people to work for free, you should not expect them to put up with a management that covers up its actions and motives and when questioned replies with "let it lie".
Concerns about the future of freeBSD revolve around the question of just exactly how many competent developers will be left after they realize that there is a secret rule book. This isn't "FUD", it's a recognition of reality.
It would be an even better genetic-elimination-device than those powered parachutes so many "flyers" use to whang themselves (and often passengers) into power lines and antenna towers now.
Slashdot Mirror
This quote about "ultra-rural" Grant County PUD is somewhat misleading:
"In fact, in ultra-rural Grant County, WA, where users of the County's FTTH system have affordable access to speeds of 100 Mbps in both directions, bandwidth usage has jumped more than 600 percent and upstream usage actually exceeds downstream usage. Why? The County believes that small businesses are sending substantially more information to the Internet than they are downloading, and gamers are vastly increasing their real-time usage."
While it's true that the users are getting 100mbps access, they are *paying* for only 1mbps access. The PUD is simply too lazy (or incompetent) to limit the actual rates. Now that the PUD is running out of cash to continue rolling out the program they are still fighting any efforts on the part of service providers to actually rate-limit connections and use that to provide quality of service (and enough cash-flow to the PUD to pay for the program).
The other problems with public power doing broadband is their bureaucratic nature. These are not business people but salaried workers who are accustomed to a business model that does not include competition or the risk of going bankrupt. They have been tutored in a regulated monopoly environment in which the "bottom line" can often be whatever they want it to be. Here in Grant County they have apparently (it's hard to get a straight answer) raised the electric power rates to help cover the fiber rollout costs. This has enraged the agricultural interests who feel, with some justification, that those who will benefit most from fiber should pay the most to roll it out.
Additionally, the PUD here has entered into questionable contracts with favored service providers. There is at the present time an investigation into these dealings being undertaken by an "independent" Seattle-area lawyer. The word "independent" is in quotes because the attorney doing the investigation told me he is acting as the attorney for the PUD Commissioners with all the secrecy a client-attorney relationship can imply. Whether the results of this investigation, which could be politically damaging, will be released to the public is "entirely up to the PUD Commissioners", he said.
The Grant County PUD is hardly a shining example of local-control broadband. The PUD controls two hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and will spend something over $200 million in their fiber project (no one yet knows the real costs). This is big money no matter how you look at it and allegations of sweetheart deals to special interests abound.
Broadband is expensive no matter who does it and no matter what a high-power lawyer in Washington, DC says. Trying to do it with a community effort might be successful or it might not be. There are many pitfalls and with so much money involved there is always the possibility of corruption and waste.
A "non-disclosure agreement" is a contract and the terms of the contract determine what can and cannot be disclosed by one (or both) of the parties. I haven't seen the terms of the SCO non-disclosure agreement but whether or not it requires you to pay them regardless of your ability to reduce your liability by removing or re-writing the code would depend upon how the agreement is written. It seems to me, and IAMAL, that SCO's claims to be "damaged" is reduced if SCO refuses to let anyone know what the damage is, let alone fix it.
Let's take an injury claim. If you help me paint my house and fall off the ladder and get hurt, then I am probably responsible. However, if you won't let me know what injuries you incurred then I cannot repair the damage. If you then take me to court and demand punitive damages to teach me a lesson for not fixing you, I can claim that you never gave me the chance to help.
If you make me sign a non-disclosure agreement that stipulates that I must pay you regardless of whether I could easily remedy the damage, then that seems pretty unfair too. In the case of our painting injury, you could show me that your arm was broken but then claim (with supporting "expert" testimony, that only a heart replacement would truly fix you up and by signing the non-disclosure I would be obligated to pay for that. Nevermind that an emergency room doc could set the arm and cast it and you'd be fine in six weeks.
Any company that would sign such a non-disclosure agreement (if it were couched in the terms you describe) would deserve what it gets.
It seems to me that just the act of refusing to allow anyone to see the infringing material casts SCO in the light of trying to maximize damage to their intellectual property rights. In other words, rather than allowing it to be fixed, they want to take it to court and assign a monetary amount to the "damage" and add punitive consequences.
Is it kernel? Is it GNU extensions/utilities? What if I use 2.0 (pre IBM)??? By not telling us which parts infringe SCO is cynically allowing the base of infringing use to expand presumably to enlarge its collections under tort.
In addition, by not allowing the community to fix the problem, SCO is basically showing that their intent was never to stop the IP infringment but to collect damages. Seems to me that this would be pretty damaging in court to have to admit that the infringing could have been easily stopped however that would interrupt their hoped-for revenue stream.
At least not until you have a reliable data system. The local PUD here decided to do video and they have gotten themselves into a quagmire with allegations of mismanagement and worse. Video over fiber seems easy technically (just multicast it) but it turned out to be a nightmare. And expensive! It will suck the life out of your project if you try to do it in the beginning.
If you have only a couple hundred acres you should be able to design a fiber network using relatively inexpensive switches. I recommend using Squid as a cheap way to ensure that bandwidth isn't hogged (a T1 is not that fast when serving 100 "high bandwidth" customers) by a few very active downloaders. Use NAT to keep costs down and stop enterprising home office users from installing their own servers. This will slow P2P down too.
But whatever you do, don't get involved in running VOIP or video over this system until you thoroughly understand all the political and technical details.
SCO has threatened to cut off IBM's licensing of Unix in the current $1B lawsuit but Sun has a perpetual license to its Unix IP. The acquisition of Sun by IBM might derail any outcome of the SCO/IBM litigation that would otherwise have resulted in serious consequences for AIX products. With Solaris available as a quick fix for any AIX licensing problems, IBM is poised to shrug it off and forge ahead claiming licensing from Sun IP covers AIX.
Furthermore, the acquisition of Sun would put IBM in the catbird seat of *nix vendors with AIX, Solaris and Linux products for practically any business niche. This acquisition, under the current circumstances, makes a lot of sense but I'd certainly hate to be in the Sun channel if it happens; IBM would almost certainly cut them off in favor of internal sales and marketing.
Expect to see a lot more ex-Sun shops turn into Linux shops if this goes through.
This is an entertaining read even though it's dated. The single thread in Unix Haters seems to me to be, "Unix is not as good as whatever-I-used-last". Whether that was VMS or LispM or RT11, etc. I can imagine turning into a curmudgeon over being forced to move from an OS that I understood well to one that I didn't; heck, I had to move from Unix to DOS and then spent years trying to make it work more like Unix (4dos, DesqView, etc.). When Linux appeared I jumped on it like a shot. It's only human nature to prefer what you know over what you don't yet know. And Unix is surely an easy target with all those arcane commands. But Apple has also shown that a Unix-like OS can be made to work pretty well in a modern computing environment. Unix endures because it seems to be adaptable to almost any idea of what computing "should be".
A patent from a high-tech company that isn't some lame attempt to steal ideas from the past and/or something that was so obvious to everyone else that no one ever thought to patent it. I am so friggin sick of patents that blatantly try to subvert progress in the name of ripping off the community that this one from Apple actually comes as a breath of fresh air. I have no idea how useful this device will be but at least it appears no one else has ever built one before.
The only issue was to have the City send notifications out to our neighbors when we first applied for a zoning varience. It wasn't a big deal but there are no covenants where this house is located so we only had to deal with the city people. We do consulting and mostly we go to client's offices although the occasional client does come here. We use the entire top floor of the house, have 3 full-time and 2 part-time employees. We do get a fair number of deliveries but no one has complained. One important thing is to try to keep a relatively low profile. Don't park in your neighbors' driveway, don't let your employees speed through the residential area (and if they do and you see them come down hard on them). In short, be a good neighbor. If your neighbors complain you are likely to have to move your business. I also recommend you incorporate as an S-Corp. I did this myself with forms from a bookstore and it worked out fine. We also have an accountant to check that we are doing things right. We stay here because the house is lakefront and it makes a great office but one more employee and we will have to find larger quarters.
This movie was panned by critics when it came out 20 years ago but was remarkably true to the characters. Robin Williams played Popeye and there was Bluto and the burger-loving character (heck, I can't remember his name). But the star of the show was Shelley Duvall as Olive Oil. Shelley should have won an Oscar for this role. She was the cartoon Olive Oil brought to life; voice, figure (or lack of it), mannerism... she had it all down pat and every scene she was in was enjoyable to those of us who grew up watching the cartoons.
Plus the location of the filming was remarkable in its ability to seem other-worldish. I have it on tape somewhere in my collection and haven't watched it in years but it's my favorite "unsung movie".
The least expensive Linux environment I could find on RH's site was $179 for the WS version. The least expensive "server" was $349 for their "basic edition" of ES. This differentiation between the server and workstation formats is a trend I see throughout the commercial distros. SuSE has gone so far as to remove functionality from its basic offering (version 8.1) in what seems to me to be an effort to direct us towards buying their spendy "server" product ($800+)
RedHat's pricing for the Itanium processors was not given (it's determined by OEMs), but a small blurb announced that the (cheap) version 7.3 for the Itanium has been discontinued!!!
While I can't fault these corporations for at least trying to turn a profit, the trend has caused me to step back and re-evaluate the use of Linux for very small business file servers. The last four servers I built have been freeBSD and it looks very much like that will continue until they, too, decide that they can gouge the customers with insanely high prices for what has been, up until recently, a "free operating system".
My next desktop will almost certainly be Debian.
I wonder what Linus thinks of all this.
The Grant County PUD was one of the first in Washington State to install Fiber in this mostly-rural and agricultural county on the "dry side" of the Cascade Mountains. There are about 10 ISPs in the county (including ours. The PUD is the wholesale provider of bandwidth and the local ISPs are retail. Every ISP sells essentially the same service and almost no one is dual-homed because the competition has driven the prices down to the point where no one can afford more than one uplink.We have essentially uncapped bandwidth on 100Mbps fiber for $23 a month (non-static IP).
However there are political shifts in the wind ahead. The farmers in this ag area are up in arms over the idea that their power bills should be capitalizing the fiber services. Unable to realize the benefits to them long-term (like their kids finding jobs here rather than in Seattle), they want the PUD to finance the fiber without raising electricity rates. With the fiber rollout only about 20% completed, it remains to be seen as to whether the rest of the county can be connected before things change radically.
We all expect this cheap bandwidth to end as the Public Utility District (whose commissioners are elected) wrestles with a way to continue the roll-out while still keeping the politically powerful farmers happy. If the PUD doesn't do it, no one (certainly not the telephone company) will. But will the rate payers, the majority of whom do not understand any benefits to them long-term, allow this to continue? Stay tuned...
First of all, if it fits a plus b plus c that's 3 out of 5 and that's "most" in practically anyone's book (not, apparently, yours). And it's not unreasonable to believe that it meets (d) ("orbits a star") as well.
Simply stating that it can't be a planet because it may not fit 2 of your 5 wholly-invented criteria is specious. Claiming that the moon (Luna) orbits the earth is not accurate either. It's just as easy to claim (and show mathematically) that the earth and Luna both modify each other's orbits to a significant extent. Therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, each orbits the other.
So a pretty good case can be made (and has been made) for the claim that earth/luna is a binary planet relationship just on these large mutual perturbations of orbits alone. And then, of course, it's 4.5 times the diameter of the 800km offered as your minimum diameter for a "planet".
Is it possible that extraterrestrials, putting around the solar system in their flying saucers, might even now be consulting their "Solar System on $5 Credits A Day" (or, "Earth through the Back Door") and reading about the "binary planets Earth/Luna"?
Naaaaah!
SCO (using its former name "Caldera") alleges that IBM took its IP and applied that to AIX and then took that and applied it to Linux. What they will have to prove in court is that there really is SCO/Unix IP in AIX that could possibly be applied to Linux. And then they will have to prove that the advances in Linux (which they claim to be as a result of IBM's "tortious" misappropriation of their IP) were not as a result of Caldera's involvement with Linux and specifically with UnitedLinux.
If IBM was responsible for the advances, what possible use was Caldera in the UnitedLinux camp? Their only contribution could have been IP since they had no viable distro and no marketing and, frankly, not much credibility.
If Caldera was contributing to SMP, journalling, etc. then they have a difficult case to win. If they weren't, then why were they involved with UL in the first place?
This shouldn't be difficult to show given that IBM's contributions are open source. What will be interesting is discovering how much of SCO's IP might have been directly borrowed from the GPL.
Are you sure you understand how all this works?
"Half the problem here is that we bill for bandwidth in the wrong way. By billing on traffic, we open ourselves to exactly this sort of problem - it would be like billing for water consumption based on pressure (rather than volume)."
This doesn't make sense to me. Pressure is like access... nothing flows until you make it flow. It is just the potential for flow. Volume of water flowing (think of it as molecules=packets) is analogous to packets flowing and is a much fairer way of charging for bandwidth since the person pays for what they used (exactly like they pay for the water they use).
"The reason ISPs bill per megabyte is so they can bill multiple customers for the same piece of infrastructure... and at the same time, over-subscribe that piece of infrastructure."
I think you have this backwards. When you charge for a connection ("access") then you can bill multiple customers because you can safely assume that not all of them will be utilizing their access fully. We had an upstream provider that had 19 PVCs on one T1 connection upstream... and was charging every one of its downstream customers for a T1! This is what is meant by "oversubscription". How, exactly, would you double bill for a measured amount of packets?
According to your theory the grocery store should only charge the first customer because then his "infrastructure" costs would be met.
"Strangely enough, paying a fixed fee based on the size of your connection is where the whole thing started. Paying per byte is a relatively recent (several years, but still recent) concept, thought up by greedy providers who realised they can charge many customers for something that is essentially free."
Bandwidth measurement was (and still is) more expensive to count and to bill than simple access. A simple connection is simple; you just provision the PVC and start billing. That's why everyone started out that way. Once the technology was in place (cheaply enough) to allow ISPs to measure bandwidth, then - and only then - could they charge for it.
I don't know how you can think that it's "free". Is your transportation free even though you've paid off your car? ISPs have to charge enough to pay their engineers, their billing people, their sales people, plus have enough to cover capital expenses for new equipment (which the customers will demand because their needs increase). Plus the ISP has to pay its own uplink charges for bandwidth (usually metered). And then, of course, there's the interest payments on the loans taken out to buy the original equipment. No, you're dead wrong. Bandwidth is not "essentially free".
"Take a look at the profit levels of some of the bigger providers in your country. Here in Australia, Telstra, Optus and Connect all report multi-million (and in many cases billion) dollar profits. Nobody can tell me that the core connectivity of the Internet isn't currently a profitable business."
I don't suppose the plethora of bankrupt US providers would convince you otherwise, either. The profit margin for an ISP is razor thin and getting thinner as providers drop prices in an attempt to gain customer base (and profitability). Even AOL is struggling. No ISP in the US is making billion dollar net profits.
I think your understanding of economics is as weak as your understanding of pressure and volume.
than the World Trade Center. Imagine planeloads of terrorists and religious extremists trying to make their point by colliding with the "elevator". Heck, for that matter imagine some unwitting student pilot in a Cessna.
When I was consulting for an ISP they received an email that identified a backdoor on their commercial ISP accounting software. This allowed anyone who knew about the backdoor to access user information including credit card data. The email included credit card information on about 50 of the ISP's subscribers just to prove the claim. We took steps to ensure that no one could gain access to that application from the 'Net but it was an eye-opener.
Patents are supposed to be "nonobvious" so just how innovative is it to symbolize deleting a file by using a garbage can icon? Even if Xerox (from which Apple borrowed the desktop idea) hadn't already had such an icon already, the patent is specious simply on the "nonobvious" grounds.
We used squid as a filter on our local school district's 'Net connection for years. In order to make it work right we set the Cisco border router to not allow any connections to port 80 from any machine other than the squid box. Then we set up the squid box as the default gw for all the machines, set the squid box to port forward port 80 to port 3128 and "viola!".
For the first few weeks we just looked through the logs of what the middle school boys were trying to access and added them to the filter list. It was simply amazing how these kids could find porn! But after a few months we got most of it into the filter list (a *long* list). Then we set squid up to notify one of the teachers whenever anyone went to a denied site. The teacher could just saunter over to the offending computer (every computer in the school is reverse DNS'ed) and tap the kid on the shoulder. Zero tolerance for porn in the classroom meant that even middle schoolers finally learned.
Of course, a school district is not the same as an ISP much less an entire country. Filtering out a 12-year-old's access to porn is important (IMHO). Filtering out an adult's access to anything is Orwellian.
But since squid *does* work, I'm just glad no one in Oz has noticed.
"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
I suppose it depends upon the vantage point of the people involved in a collision. Which would you rather be hit by: a Ford Explorer or a Honda CRZ?
There are also issues of a smaller car being more maneuverable. My wife once avoided a serious accident by being able to swerve her VW Rabbit very quickly to safely pass a camper shell that blew off from the vehicle in front of her on the freeway.
While larger and heavier vehicles absorb collision stress better than those of less mass, it's likely that a larger proportion of lighter vehicles on the road could reduce injuries by simply reducing the collision loads.
Fair enough (regarding the cabal and the rules). So why not simply tell everyone what he did and who was pissed? It still looks like it is the same type of secrecy that you'd find in a large corporation rather than an open-source development team. And I don't think /. spread this "without any basis". As a member of the open-source community you cannot expect to be able to maintain a "you don't dare question us" attitude. It's not FUD to publicly question a set of actions or to publicly worry about the direction of a project.
I suppose if you define "FUD" as "questions I don't want to hear and don't want to answer" you're right. Otherwise this article seems pertinent and germane to a subject that purports to be "open source". If any developer is truly free to port code to a project, then every developer who does so needs to have a copy of the rule book. If Matt's actions were contrary to a secret set of rules that only you and a few other select people understand, then how can any other developer work for your group with any sense of security? The alternative is to assume that there is an elite cabal whom one must never piss off regardless of whether they're right or wrong. The only question then is who they are.
If you want people to work for free, you should not expect them to put up with a management that covers up its actions and motives and when questioned replies with "let it lie".
Concerns about the future of freeBSD revolve around the question of just exactly how many competent developers will be left after they realize that there is a secret rule book. This isn't "FUD", it's a recognition of reality.
Experimental aircraft (even experimental gliders) require a pilot's license. Good luck finding an instructor for this little gem.
It would be an even better genetic-elimination-device than those powered parachutes so many "flyers" use to whang themselves (and often passengers) into power lines and antenna towers now.