Right. The grandparent answered my question. A contract is a two-way street. Comcast is likely going to lose. I don't think she'll have trouble at least getting her legal costs vs. the RIAA out of this.
It's definitely financial suicide. First, every customer they turn in is no longer a customer. Second, I'm sure that some competitor would be very eager to have that list of customers for direct mailing.
What law is the basis for this legal action? Is this a law specific to her state of residence? Is it an anti-spam law? I'm not aware of any federal law that says ISPs are legally-bound to keep private their customer's names. The only laws that I can think of along these lines specifically deal with medical records.
Don't get mad at me, just tell me what is the legal basis. Show me the law with the specific wording, not just interpretation of intent or precedent. I'm interested.
How about purposely excluding relevant information from blog entries to popular, online tech-related news sites? No sooner did I scroll past the ads before TFA when I saw this in bold letters:
Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey.
Since failure is unpredictable even in expensive equipment, you're going to buy two of your servers for redundancy anyways (right?) - so the longevity argument doesn't even factor in.
What a load of bunk. Failure is predictable. You won't be able to point to a specific machine and say, "I decree this machine will fail!" But you can have a grasp on the overall situation, especially if you study duty cycle ratings and read tech sites.
The fact that you can make estimates on failure is why you'd chose an enterprise SCSI hard drive for your server instead of the cheapest ATA drive on the market. It's also the reason why RAID exists. You can be reasonably certain that although one drive in the array may fail, the chances are almost none that all of them will fail at once.
Also, I'd have a back-up server if I wanted to minimize downtime, not because it has anything to do with longevity.
I'd like for my equipment to last 10 years at a minimum. That's the least I could ask for. The best would be: Until I'm ready to replace it. Ten years is a nice, round turnover period, especially when you're taxpayer-funded. Even so, the proper length of time is likely, "until it no longer does what we need it to do." Unfortunately, users confuse "need" and "want", so companies end up buying overpowered desktops that mainly dedicate CPU cycles to user entertainment, then self-destruct after 7 years.
But it's not just a question of how long it can be kept in service, it's also how trouble-free those computers remain. Lots of hardware failures lower productivity and cost money in technician wages, even if a warranty covers the parts. Generally machines are troublesome, or they're not. I've never found any amount of hardware failure acceptable, and generally machines that fail early are problematic along the way.
I guess this explains why it's so hard to find used Sun equipment to tinker with at a cheap price.:o)
Do you really expect Walmart to be happy with Walmart.com, and not also snap up Walmart.biz, Walmart.org, Walmart.biz, Walmart.us, and anything else that comes up?
Yes. Walmart.us hasn't been purchased by them yet, but it appears a squatter wants $6,000 for it.
I hope this doesn't cause those with MSSQL horror stories to come out of the woodwork, but...
A 150GB database is very lower mid-range for a real-world database.
I wouldn't classify that as a low- or mid-range size. If we compare against the total number of installations, I'd classify the low-end at a few hundred megabytes or less, since there are so many low-traffic sites running dynamic content or forums populating the web. I've seen MySQL installations choke with a hair over 200MB of data (not crash, but run ungodly slow), so I'm not surprised with the result. MySQL is clearly not the tool for the job here, and I don't know who recommended it based on your client requirements, but it was a mistake. In fact, I'm surprised that it even worked at all, however sluggish it was.
These are the problems you may never notice if you just run a small website from MySQL, but will hurt you when you have a table with 100M records in it.
From my very first experimentation with MySQL, I was exposed to the all the criticisms that many Slashdotters have posted here today. My understanding is that it's popular because Joe Sixpack can store his tiny data set somewhere, and it's more convenient to access than reading a bunch of flat files. Its popularity is helped by the network effects of its use, whereby the expectation for Software X is that you're running MySQL, and often MySQL support is the first thing that's added.
I hope and pray that 5.x allows me to port this application. I'd love to get the whole thing end to end on a free platform. (Postgres wouldn't fly with the customer at the time because of vague issues with not knowing the product, not wanting to gamble on another OSS project, etc).
That's a rather unusual situation. Your customer is paying you to rework their whole application end-to-end, but they're overruling your recommendation for a better tool to get the job done?
Is MySQL 5.x the answer to my prayers? Or just a cruel reminder of why MS software costs what it does?
I doubt it. The MySQL developers would have to admit something is wrong before they could answer anyone's prayers. I hate to pigeon-hole MySQL based on its reputation, but hey, it deserves it. And for what you're doing, I don't see how MSSQL's cost is a problem. MSSQL is a decent product for mid-size installations. For low-end stuff, it's too pricey, but if you buy volume licensing, it's not that bad. What is it, $2000/CPU for unlimited connections?
I've been able to recover data from hard disks that weren't spinning up by giving them a good tap after power on. So yeah, in rare cases, it may be effective. Don't try this if the disk is already spinning, though.
Result #5: ServSafe Alcohol (R) Training Program, Comprehensive interactive training for those who serve alcohol.
Oh, by the way, if anyone is interested: I'm running a ConsumeSafe Alcohol (R) Training Program, whereby I offer comprehensive "interactive" training for those who wish to consume alcoholic beverages. Just bring a 12-pack with you and I'll show you how it's done.
"Yeah ok, and what about the little over 160 million other people thats left?"
You edited out the partial-answer to your question when you quoted it:
"Yahoo also hosts online stores and offers online games (simple ones), but you have to register to use them."
The point being that, even if you aren't choosing a brand or an activity specifically because it's "Yahoo" branded, you have to register. So "registered users" isn't a fair measure. Another relevant example: If Yahoo buys a service I use, and I really a registered user, or did I just happen to be in the way during a purchasing glut?
I was a former Geocities user before it was bought out. I became a registered Yahoo user without ever selecting their brand. Then they moved my pages, lost them, removed FTP access to I couldn't update it, and blocked POP3 access to my Geocities e-mail account. This made the service no longer useful to me, but I couldn't unregister, so there's one account right there. Some friends invited me to play some of those online Yahoo games, so once again I registered. The games could have been hosted anywhere, I didn't care. They could have been registration-free, but they weren't. I also had to re-register with Yahoo to get my DSL service updated. Apparently I count for three registered users.
The whole point of this anecdote is to demonstrate that if the measuring stick is registered users, the information isn't meaningful unless we know whether or not those registered users specifically selected Yahoo because of brand loyalty.
Yeah, uh huh. They have these registered users because SBC Yahoo customers have no choice. Either you register, or you don't get your DSL service. Yahoo also hosts online stores and offers online games (simple ones), but you have to register to use them.
I'm not exactly sure what Yahoo does, and I don't think they are either. But I do know that Google is the world's best Internet search engine, and by a long shot. I know that when companies have thousands or millions of documents, and they want to share them with the public, they hire Google, not Yahoo, to provide the search technology.
If it's already available, why are they passing a law to make it available? Also: The budget listed on the text of the bill makes no mention of DNS servers run by the state.
It's not the end of the world, but it's a regular old stupid, inefficient waste of taxpayer dollars. How are they going to maintain individual settings for each user with dynamic IPs? It's going to phenominally expensive for ISPs unless they just block it for everyone. And even then, the more banned content added to the rules, the more rules that need to be checked for every request that goes out. That's not a job that can be handled by a single network appliance.
The most asinine part of this is that there is a market niche in private industry that is already offering this service, from the power necessary to filter a single PC up to a whole enterprise gateway. The major players have been doing it for a decade, and they're doing a better job than the A.G.'s office could ever hope to do. Why don't these people just avail themselves of this software?
There's absolutely no reason why the Utah state government needs to be involved here. If someone can afford yearly Internet access, he can afford NetNanny. Excuse me, but I think there's another agenda at work here.
Forget the constitutionality of it, it's just plain stupid on so many levels:
The ratings system isn't enforceable outside of the Utah, where I'm guessing 99.98 per cent of the smut originates.
"Black market" proxies will become very profitable (see Saudia Arabia). So will flat-rate dial-up originating from out-of-state ISPs taking advantage of the situation. How will they deal with ad hoc wireless? How about satellite service?
They're making ISPs legally liable for something they have no control over. That's not a solid legal foundation. Neither is a felony an appropriate charge for non-compliance.
They're having the A.G.'s office draw up the list. There are already private companies that do a good job with classifying content and filtering it through software.
Why do the ISPs have to handle the list submissions instead of the A.G.'s office? Oh that's right, because it's expensive to field those calls. Any right-thinking ISP should immediately quadruple access fees in Utah.
HTTP is not the only protocol that delivers naughty pictures to a hard drive.
Who updates the list, the ISP? Or will it be a static list, so it's almost worthless in a year? What kind of supercomputers are they going to use for the line-matching on every piece of traffic coming into the state?
Uh... According to their own admission, the "opposition" hijacked a domain belonging to the Antipiratbyrån. That's about the only illegal activity going on here that I see. This doesn't help the cause.
How is Theo being annoying? If one open system doesn't have the specs to support the hardware, then none of them will. Or has Adaptec started shipping x86-only binary drivers to Linux or FreeBSD? Adaptec has apparently underestimated the size of the Linux/*BSD server market which relies on their products. Adaptec: Please stop listening to Microsoft's figures based only on OEM sales, they're not accurate. The only company will the balls to sell me a server with out the MS Tax and still support it, is IBM.
I can't understand why it's taking so long to move from regular projection to digital projection. I'm hoping someone with more experience here can fill us in on what's going on.
Forgive me if someone already posted this, but I don't see it in any of the comments modded up... I'm guessing a major hurdle (in the US anyway) is going to be whole support structure surrounding film theaters. There is a whole industry dedicated to producing the parts and consumables in film reels, and the labor that goes into duplicating the films, distributing them, collecting them, and destroying them so they don't get into the black market.
These jobs, like almost every job in Hollywood, are unionized. It's a major hurdle to jump, because the union is going to fight to preserve the status quo, and if industry pressure dictates that change must happen, that labor force is going to have to be re-trained at someone else's expense. You can bet it won't be at the union's expense. In light of this, the $100,000 projectors aren't likely to be the major hurdle in adoption, unless the movie theaters are being pushed to foot the bill.
If we look at it this way, the cost savings in distribution is a problem, not an advantage. Well, it's an advantage to the consumer, but the industry couldn't care less about those people.
I think the only answer is improvements in both recycling and manufacturing techniques, because this has to be costly when you can't deliver on an order and your competitor does. But how wasteful is it to just toss 'em? They're going to end up in a landfill within 10 years anyway. If they're sold to consumers, there's a strong probability that a whole computer containing the defective chip will end up taking up space in a landfill, rather than just the chip.
It seems to me that the cost and energy going into manufacturing a complete unit around a defective chip with a shorter useful lifetime is a lot more wasteful than just tossing the part, no?
This is sort of cheating. It's not reading Access format files, it's using Microsoft drivers to query the database. I don't have this option on Linux. There are tools that read OLE streams on Linux, but they often choke on Access files or don't read the contents of tables.
Speak for yourself. I don't want that Windows set-up autorun, 50,000 confirmations-before-install crap rammed down my throat. OOo's set up program name is 'setup'. What is so difficult to understand there?
In all honesty, I don't even like that. I'd prefer a directory heirarchy that I can put in a tarball. Leave the final tweaks, like the filetype registration and icon copy in a bunch of separate scripts. For the non-technical user, they can put a setup script in the archive root directory all by itself so it'll be nice and obvious.
I really hope they mean this. Dealing with MS Office formats has got to be insanely difficult and as of yet no one has really been able to do it well (not even Microsoft!).
No kidding! But it's never going to happen that way. Jeez, assert yourself. Why not pick a suitable format for your document storage needs that will be readable in 10 years, and then pick the application that can read it, and best fits your budget?
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Right. The grandparent answered my question. A contract is a two-way street. Comcast is likely going to lose. I don't think she'll have trouble at least getting her legal costs vs. the RIAA out of this.
It's definitely financial suicide. First, every customer they turn in is no longer a customer. Second, I'm sure that some competitor would be very eager to have that list of customers for direct mailing.
Isn't the purpose of a warrant to have a safety net from illegal searches and seizures of personal property by the government?
What law is the basis for this legal action? Is this a law specific to her state of residence? Is it an anti-spam law? I'm not aware of any federal law that says ISPs are legally-bound to keep private their customer's names. The only laws that I can think of along these lines specifically deal with medical records.
Don't get mad at me, just tell me what is the legal basis. Show me the law with the specific wording, not just interpretation of intent or precedent. I'm interested.
How about purposely excluding relevant information from blog entries to popular, online tech-related news sites? No sooner did I scroll past the ads before TFA when I saw this in bold letters:
Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey.
Wow, does that change the tone of the discussion.
Since failure is unpredictable even in expensive equipment, you're going to buy two of your servers for redundancy anyways (right?) - so the longevity argument doesn't even factor in.
What a load of bunk. Failure is predictable. You won't be able to point to a specific machine and say, "I decree this machine will fail!" But you can have a grasp on the overall situation, especially if you study duty cycle ratings and read tech sites.
The fact that you can make estimates on failure is why you'd chose an enterprise SCSI hard drive for your server instead of the cheapest ATA drive on the market. It's also the reason why RAID exists. You can be reasonably certain that although one drive in the array may fail, the chances are almost none that all of them will fail at once.
Also, I'd have a back-up server if I wanted to minimize downtime, not because it has anything to do with longevity.
I'd like for my equipment to last 10 years at a minimum. That's the least I could ask for. The best would be: Until I'm ready to replace it. Ten years is a nice, round turnover period, especially when you're taxpayer-funded. Even so, the proper length of time is likely, "until it no longer does what we need it to do." Unfortunately, users confuse "need" and "want", so companies end up buying overpowered desktops that mainly dedicate CPU cycles to user entertainment, then self-destruct after 7 years.
:o)
But it's not just a question of how long it can be kept in service, it's also how trouble-free those computers remain. Lots of hardware failures lower productivity and cost money in technician wages, even if a warranty covers the parts. Generally machines are troublesome, or they're not. I've never found any amount of hardware failure acceptable, and generally machines that fail early are problematic along the way.
I guess this explains why it's so hard to find used Sun equipment to tinker with at a cheap price.
Some other guy/girl came along and build it, and all the credit would go to the one that build it instead of the one that design the machine.
Ha ha. Like that isn't happening now, even with the records in place.
Do you really expect Walmart to be happy with Walmart.com, and not also snap up Walmart.biz, Walmart.org, Walmart.biz, Walmart.us, and anything else that comes up?
Yes. Walmart.us hasn't been purchased by them yet, but it appears a squatter wants $6,000 for it.
I wouldn't classify that as a low- or mid-range size. If we compare against the total number of installations, I'd classify the low-end at a few hundred megabytes or less, since there are so many low-traffic sites running dynamic content or forums populating the web. I've seen MySQL installations choke with a hair over 200MB of data (not crash, but run ungodly slow), so I'm not surprised with the result. MySQL is clearly not the tool for the job here, and I don't know who recommended it based on your client requirements, but it was a mistake. In fact, I'm surprised that it even worked at all, however sluggish it was.
From my very first experimentation with MySQL, I was exposed to the all the criticisms that many Slashdotters have posted here today. My understanding is that it's popular because Joe Sixpack can store his tiny data set somewhere, and it's more convenient to access than reading a bunch of flat files. Its popularity is helped by the network effects of its use, whereby the expectation for Software X is that you're running MySQL, and often MySQL support is the first thing that's added.
That's a rather unusual situation. Your customer is paying you to rework their whole application end-to-end, but they're overruling your recommendation for a better tool to get the job done?
I doubt it. The MySQL developers would have to admit something is wrong before they could answer anyone's prayers. I hate to pigeon-hole MySQL based on its reputation, but hey, it deserves it. And for what you're doing, I don't see how MSSQL's cost is a problem. MSSQL is a decent product for mid-size installations. For low-end stuff, it's too pricey, but if you buy volume licensing, it's not that bad. What is it, $2000/CPU for unlimited connections?
I've been able to recover data from hard disks that weren't spinning up by giving them a good tap after power on. So yeah, in rare cases, it may be effective. Don't try this if the disk is already spinning, though.
You edited out the partial-answer to your question when you quoted it:
The point being that, even if you aren't choosing a brand or an activity specifically because it's "Yahoo" branded, you have to register. So "registered users" isn't a fair measure. Another relevant example: If Yahoo buys a service I use, and I really a registered user, or did I just happen to be in the way during a purchasing glut?
I was a former Geocities user before it was bought out. I became a registered Yahoo user without ever selecting their brand. Then they moved my pages, lost them, removed FTP access to I couldn't update it, and blocked POP3 access to my Geocities e-mail account. This made the service no longer useful to me, but I couldn't unregister, so there's one account right there. Some friends invited me to play some of those online Yahoo games, so once again I registered. The games could have been hosted anywhere, I didn't care. They could have been registration-free, but they weren't. I also had to re-register with Yahoo to get my DSL service updated. Apparently I count for three registered users.
The whole point of this anecdote is to demonstrate that if the measuring stick is registered users, the information isn't meaningful unless we know whether or not those registered users specifically selected Yahoo because of brand loyalty.
Yeah, uh huh. They have these registered users because SBC Yahoo customers have no choice. Either you register, or you don't get your DSL service. Yahoo also hosts online stores and offers online games (simple ones), but you have to register to use them.
I'm not exactly sure what Yahoo does, and I don't think they are either. But I do know that Google is the world's best Internet search engine, and by a long shot. I know that when companies have thousands or millions of documents, and they want to share them with the public, they hire Google, not Yahoo, to provide the search technology.
If it's already available, why are they passing a law to make it available? Also: The budget listed on the text of the bill makes no mention of DNS servers run by the state.
It's not the end of the world, but it's a regular old stupid, inefficient waste of taxpayer dollars. How are they going to maintain individual settings for each user with dynamic IPs? It's going to phenominally expensive for ISPs unless they just block it for everyone. And even then, the more banned content added to the rules, the more rules that need to be checked for every request that goes out. That's not a job that can be handled by a single network appliance.
The most asinine part of this is that there is a market niche in private industry that is already offering this service, from the power necessary to filter a single PC up to a whole enterprise gateway. The major players have been doing it for a decade, and they're doing a better job than the A.G.'s office could ever hope to do. Why don't these people just avail themselves of this software?
There's absolutely no reason why the Utah state government needs to be involved here. If someone can afford yearly Internet access, he can afford NetNanny. Excuse me, but I think there's another agenda at work here.
The ratings system isn't enforceable outside of the Utah, where I'm guessing 99.98 per cent of the smut originates.
"Black market" proxies will become very profitable (see Saudia Arabia). So will flat-rate dial-up originating from out-of-state ISPs taking advantage of the situation. How will they deal with ad hoc wireless? How about satellite service?
They're making ISPs legally liable for something they have no control over. That's not a solid legal foundation. Neither is a felony an appropriate charge for non-compliance.
They're having the A.G.'s office draw up the list. There are already private companies that do a good job with classifying content and filtering it through software.
Why do the ISPs have to handle the list submissions instead of the A.G.'s office? Oh that's right, because it's expensive to field those calls. Any right-thinking ISP should immediately quadruple access fees in Utah.
HTTP is not the only protocol that delivers naughty pictures to a hard drive.
Who updates the list, the ISP? Or will it be a static list, so it's almost worthless in a year? What kind of supercomputers are they going to use for the line-matching on every piece of traffic coming into the state?
Uh... According to their own admission, the "opposition" hijacked a domain belonging to the Antipiratbyrån. That's about the only illegal activity going on here that I see. This doesn't help the cause.
How is Theo being annoying? If one open system doesn't have the specs to support the hardware, then none of them will. Or has Adaptec started shipping x86-only binary drivers to Linux or FreeBSD? Adaptec has apparently underestimated the size of the Linux/*BSD server market which relies on their products. Adaptec: Please stop listening to Microsoft's figures based only on OEM sales, they're not accurate. The only company will the balls to sell me a server with out the MS Tax and still support it, is IBM.
These jobs, like almost every job in Hollywood, are unionized. It's a major hurdle to jump, because the union is going to fight to preserve the status quo, and if industry pressure dictates that change must happen, that labor force is going to have to be re-trained at someone else's expense. You can bet it won't be at the union's expense. In light of this, the $100,000 projectors aren't likely to be the major hurdle in adoption, unless the movie theaters are being pushed to foot the bill.
If we look at it this way, the cost savings in distribution is a problem, not an advantage. Well, it's an advantage to the consumer, but the industry couldn't care less about those people.
I think the only answer is improvements in both recycling and manufacturing techniques, because this has to be costly when you can't deliver on an order and your competitor does. But how wasteful is it to just toss 'em? They're going to end up in a landfill within 10 years anyway. If they're sold to consumers, there's a strong probability that a whole computer containing the defective chip will end up taking up space in a landfill, rather than just the chip.
It seems to me that the cost and energy going into manufacturing a complete unit around a defective chip with a shorter useful lifetime is a lot more wasteful than just tossing the part, no?
This is sort of cheating. It's not reading Access format files, it's using Microsoft drivers to query the database. I don't have this option on Linux. There are tools that read OLE streams on Linux, but they often choke on Access files or don't read the contents of tables.
Are you talking about the RPM of the beta version? I've had zero problems installing it on Linux or Windows.
Speak for yourself. I don't want that Windows set-up autorun, 50,000 confirmations-before-install crap rammed down my throat. OOo's set up program name is 'setup'. What is so difficult to understand there?
In all honesty, I don't even like that. I'd prefer a directory heirarchy that I can put in a tarball. Leave the final tweaks, like the filetype registration and icon copy in a bunch of separate scripts. For the non-technical user, they can put a setup script in the archive root directory all by itself so it'll be nice and obvious.