The internet is, by it's very nature, not a location-specific sort of thing. Why wouldn't every ISP in Sweeden simply pack up and move to Norway? They keep their traffic, keep their design, keep their cookies, and all they have to do is live in lovely Norway.
Actually, I got engaged to my girlfriend with a ring she already had and wore frequently. Then, we went to the store to pick out her _real_ engagement ring. She and I agree on a lot of things politically, and we both hate DeBeers, that's for sure. They kill way the hell too many people. So, we got a lab-created Sapphire ring that was really nice and only about $120 with insurance.
I think the symbol is way more important than the stone. It matters more that you give her a ring and she wears it on her left ring finger than that it has a diamond in it. Really, the purpose of an engagement ring is as a promise and as a symbol to people who might hit on her that she's taken.:) A Sapphire does that just as well as a diamond.
The major problem with a cashless culture is that, by definition, it's not physical enough in a time of panic.
Back around the Y2K scare, the Federal Reserve printed up unbelievable assloads of physical cash. We're talking on the order of $300 _billion_ physical dollars. The reason was that they were preparing for a bank panic in which loads of people who go to the ATM and try to get cash out. If we all attempted to take our physical cash home without it being there.. Well, total chaos would ensue.
The big problem with a cashless society is that people feel much safer having a hard, physical object they can place their hand directly on and say "This is value" during a time of crisis.
(Note that this used to be true of gold. Perhaps we should go back to that: Every family has a few pounds of gold laying around, just in case of major emergencies!:)
Go ahead and burn all the farms
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Eco-Terrorism
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What so many people fail to realize is that bio-engineering of foods has been going on for centuries. Ever heard of cross-breeding plants? Or selective breeding of everything from petunias to cows? Why do you think farmers try to get their biggest, strongest bulls to mate with their best milk-producing cows? So they'll get bigger cows that produce more milk.
Genetic manipulation of thousands of species has been going on since before the industrial revoloution. So, if you think it's right or justifiable to burn someone's property because they're doing genetic manipulation, perhaps you should go ahead and burn every farm in the world and drive us all into famine.
I've been intrested in real estate investment lately, but everytime I try to find information which relates to the actual nitty-gritty details of things like purchasing forclosures or properly valuing homes or land, I hit a brick wall of "And we'll tell you for just 37 easy payments of 29.99!"
Anyone know where I can get good, detailed information that topic?
The largest problem I see with the United States today is people just like this guy. People who are anti-freedom. Allow me to explain:
Too many people I see posting here are constantly claiming that the constitution was designed to make government efficent or to make laws which kept the courts from being constantly clogged with questions regarding a few of the same facts. It's simply not true. The First Amendment is there to protect people like Drudge, whether you like him or not. It's there to protect the writings of Jefferson just as much as it's there to protect Penthouse, whether you like it or not. It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law except in cases where somebody somewhere might be offended or believe something which isn't in the intrests of some group or other." It says "Congress shall make no law".
The idea here was not content restrictions, it was regulation restriction. It's there to keep Republicans from silencing Democrats and Democrats from silencing Republicans and to keep both of them from silencing me.
I noticed in one post someone said the constitution was outdated, that Jefferson had never seen a machine gun. I wholeheartedly disagree. If Jefferson were alive today, he'd want every single last citizen to own an M16 and a bullet proof vest. Not for hunting, not for shooting sports. No, the reason he laid out was simple: To shoot police and soldiers. To fight a revolution. To defend ourselves from the State.
And now we have lots and lots of guys like this. People who proclaim the "public good" (whatever the hell that is) must be upheld, no matter what. If that means I can't write this piece because I refrence revolution, so be it. If it means our own state can remove all our freedoms, so be it. If it means our ultimate demise... so be it. For the love of God, think of the Children!
Then there's this bizarre concept of corporate control over our lives. You wanna know where any such control begins? Government control. Look at any industry you believe to be overly controlling and I guarantee it's a heavily regulated industry. The only way such control can possibly exist is if there is government force keeping other companies from coming in and outcompeting (perhaps by offering less 'controlling' policies) those companies. The only solution to this is simple: Remove the power of government to regulate these companies (with the exception of keeping them from phyiscal force and outright fraud, just as it would with any citizen) and these companies will have no reason to pay off senators. They won't be able to do things that their customers don't like, because there will be others there to do things their customers do like. Deregulate and all these problems vanish. Move to a truly constitutional government, and everything will work itself out within a few weeks.
Anything other than such a strict constitutional government is a proposition for antifreedom, anticapitalism, antiwealth, and antilife.
--Me
[wales001@dontspam.aristotle.bomis.com]
(Moderate me up for once!)
The statement you make in this article about software coming out in an hour to remove the ad after download is pretty silly, IMHO. The -exact- same thing could be said about HTML: You just chop out the code for advertisements from the HTML. Think about it: You could get most of them by looking for a which contained solely an img src, with that image being a link, and the whole thing being centered. You could nail almost all ads with that. So, then, why hasn't software come out to do that to HTML, eh?
In fact, you could have central 'black hole' banner ad servers: Once per day, there's a big tar.gz released of regular expressions (perl or sed style) to edit the banner-ads of the day from HTML. That way, doubleclick or whoever couldn't just keep updating their HTML to keep you from knocking it out, as people would look at the ad and put up a regex to handle it, and they'd only get about 4,000 impressions on that ad before it vanished from the 'net.<br><br>
Therefore, history implies that such software would not come out in reality.
You know, you mention the freedom of speech here. In the past, the supreme court has upheld never really made *any* decisions based on 'Copyright Violation Restriction' of speech. They don't seem to have made any claims that speaking in a factual manner about a copyrighted thing would constitute an unprotected form of expression. The closest thing I can find is a 1964 defamation ruling which involved several factual errors. *Factual* errors. Which implies 2 things. First, that I can always say "Fuck microsoft, they suck [figuratively] donkey balls, so does their stinkin software". I am expressing opinion. I can also say "CmdrTaco is one ugly fella". Again, expressing an opinion and the burden of proof is not on my shoulders, as it would require self-censorship and too great a restriction on speech. Secondly, that I can *always* say "I've had Windows 2000 crash on me 7 times in the last 3 weeks", if I have in fact had it crash on me. (And, in many situations, even if I haven't)
I could not, however, state that: "Microsoft chairman Bill Gates steals cars. I saw him do it." unless I could back that up. I could claim he does it without saying I had seen him, thus chalking it up to 'journalisitc factual error' which the supreme court grants happens from time to time.
It is of great intrest as well, that the supreme court has always looked to limit speech and expression in as few ways as possible. That is to say, if you've commited some act of expression which presents a "Clear and present danger" to the general peace, you can be stopped. If, for instance, I were to hold a rally in which I ordered those at said rally to... say.. blow up a building, then the cops -could- rush in and stop me. But, they could not stop me from intimating this without directly saying it, because it would be an unreasonable and too-large restriction on speech. See the supreme court descisions on the first amendment by topic at: Findlaw's constitutional descisions page.
Given that all of this is true, I'd say you should wait for it to go to court, see if you win in the first court (you probably won't) and then instantly get a writ of certiary for the Supreme Court based on first amendment issues. Bust this badboy before it goes any further. Anyway, as an act of Civil Disobedience and rejecting Microsoft's right to tell me I can't say it, I would like to now say these things:
1> Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 is, in my opinion, a badly written piece of software, based on no evidence but my opinion that Microsoft produces nothing but badly written software.
2> Microsoft produces nothing, in my opinion, but bad software. Excel is the only exception to this opinion. Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows NT, Microsoft Windows 2000, and MS-DOS all suck. They are all, in my opinion, bad software and should all be deleted from every machine on earth.
Those are constitutionally protected statements. If they want someone, let them come for me.
--Sagev, Freedom Fighter vegas@my.bomis.com
Aren't we a few years early? Or late?
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Happy Pi Day!
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It seems to me that since pi =~ 3.14159, that the real Pi day can only come along once per century. And the next one shoul be coming up March 14, 2016 (3-14-16). Or, better yet, we're a few centuries late: Seems the -real- pi day shoulda been 3-14-1592. And, of course, in 13,000 or so years, we'll possibly have 3-14-15926. Maybe if nanotech and virus-creation technology devlop fast enough, I'll live to see it.:)
I agree. I figure it's only a matter of time before the crackdown begins, though. So, that's a good thing at least. Hopefully whoever is pulling this off will go to prison for a long long long time.
<i>The opinions expressed are my own, no one elses. The email address is an anonymous one, but I do read it from time to time.</i>
I used to work for www.bomis.com. Here's what I would suggest: Get yourself a relatively cheap machine to start out. A nice little Athlon 600 with 256M of RAM and a 4.8GB HDD. That'll give you plenty of space for content and such a box will handle zillions (well, a few million) pageviews. You don't need to go with the big $50,000 enterprise-class, Quad-Xeon with 2TB of RAM machines. Get your domainname, promote promote promote promote. Be -very- attentive to your users. Always design in a way that you can move the entire thing to another machine with another domainname just by changing a couple config files. Never hard code in any addresses. Think long and hard about traffic direction. You want a way to say: 'Send 30% of traffic to box 1, and Send 25% to box 2, and Box 3 is a stud, so send the remaining 45% to him.' Also, if you're going to have anything searchable, try to write a way to have a database in some central location. Where be it an NFS or a database server.. just try to make sure you can access the database on multiple machines. Or, at least, write a cron to drag it to machine 2 when you add a machine 2. Write everything to regrow itself. Have cron jobs that rebuild everything for you. If your/home/httpd/html/ directory gets rm -Rf'd, it should rebuild itself. If such happened to Bomis, Bomis would simply heal. --Johnny Wales Developer, Bomis Browser Developer, Bomis Webmail
I live in Huntsville, AL. I'm a software engineer who's still working on a degree, with about 2 years experience (workforce) or 11 years (since I started hacking around in QBasic.:) ). I get $20/hr.
If software Entrepeneurs are restricted by the GPL, then how does RedHat exist?
If I want to package a bunch of GPL software onto a CD and sell that CD, then that's legal, isn't it? (as long as I include the source) And, if I want to write my own proprietary software using GPLd code, then I'm basically stealing. No different from running a warez site. So, I don't see a problem there. Heck, I plan on making some money with an Idea I have involving free code.
I was planning on beginning work on this sometime next week, oddly. I've expanded heavily on the idea, and I think that making sure they're all GPL isn't all that important. BSD license would be fine. Code without a license would also be fine. Basically, what you'd need to worry about is whether or not it's freely redistributable.
Obviously, one wouldn't want to put up the source distrobution of Sun's JDK. Sun's community license prohibits it, and Sun would probably come yell at you. If, on the other hand, you find a piece of code that has as a license header: 'Hope this code is useful to you. Enjoy' Then you -can- post that, since the author clearly doesn't much care what his code is used for.
Now all I need are ideas for domainnames.:) --Sagev wales001@my.bomis.com
At the last company I worked for, we used the names of Philosophers for our servers. There's Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, and a new one (www4 right now, I'm fighting for it to be Ayn.. After Ayn Rand) But, this is a -huge- bank of names to draw upon. -Me
Re:Big claims .. I'd be worried for my head
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2.3TB drives for $50
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100Mbs isn't really a good data transfer rate. Assuming I'm reading it right (100 megabits per second.. I think megabytes per second would be MBps). Current EIDE/UDMA drives get about 11 MBps. And this is only 10MBps? (Note: hdparm -t/dev/hda3 tells me my drive is currently doing 11.35 MBps.) If it is 100MBps, well... then.. bathe it and bring it before me.
As a slight side note, I gotta say I think all the talk of this being vaporware is kinda silly. Firstly, so what if it is? You'll go on living in your day to day 6.3GB world and be as happy as the proverbial clam. Secondly, why would they do that? Do they have any competitors to crush by doing it? Do they really stand to gain anything with it? No. Investors would want to see a prototype in action before they'd give it any money, and all the big tech companies have bigtime badass doctors of engineering to go over the reports they've been given and see if it's feasible.
Well, Tony, you make a good point. Here's my only counter argument: In the GNU Manifesto, RMS makes quite a lot of noise about software patents and any sort of legal ownership of 'knowledge'. Which is to say, of course, code. I disagree with that thought. Like it or not, we wouldn't be where we are if Microsoft hadn't produced an easy to use (relatively) set of software. We wouldn't be where we are if the world had been GPL from the beginning. Computers would have been tools of research only, instead of the game/office/productivity/information platform it is now. There, I've said it. Microsoft *caused* the beginnings of our revoloution when it came into existance. Without microsoft, None of this would exist, and there would be no community to write linux because computers would still be mammoth things which are used only for number crunching.
Secondly, I *totally* disagree that a true free market is an impossible ideal. I also *totally* disagree with the idea that communism is in any way -ideal-. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Communism and Socialism are evil, and Marx was a raving lunatic.
But, that goes outside the scope of this post. If you care to argue the finer points of political and economic theroy, drop me a line. Until then, visit Free-Market.net. --Vegas@my.bomis.com --wales001@my.bomis.com --Sagev
Man, oh man. This article highlights something which I've always disliked about the GNU/Stallman way of thinking. It seems to claim that greed is a bad thing and a negative thing. That anywhere money goes, evil must follow. I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment of the situation. Greed means competition, and competition means advancement. One of the major things that will a selling point to a lot of people here at slashdot and you crazy GNU communists will be whether or not a particular distrobution is 100% open source. As a result, the 'greedy' competitors in the linux market will be sure to release their changes as open source... Sacrificing their hard fought code to the community so the community will buy their product. Believe it or not, market forces are a Good Thing. Greed is a good thing. Communism is a Bad Thing.
By this, I don't mean you shouldn't assist the community, I mean people should stop whining and moaning whenever someone does something *other* than that. Caldera wants to release a closed-source GUI install doowhang? Fine, sounds like a good idea to me. I won't complain. But, all Red Hat or SuSE would need to do to beat them would be to release the same utility as an Open Source doowhang. And this applies to everything. Their greed will force them to do what we, the consumers, want.
Bah. Linux isn't gonna blow up or be 'pushed to ship' until Linus or Alan decide that they want to be owned by one of the major competitors. Lets not forget that Linux develops at the speed and in the direction that the community wishes it to, not the major companies. The best they can hope for is to contribute code and thus become liked by the core developers.
This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while now: Artistic computers. Yesterday's article about plexiglas cases was pretty nifty, but I had been thinking about cases made out of other stuff. Wood, for instance. And what about a furry router? Or a mail server with spikes sticking out of it? These could all be great machines, except for a minor detail: I'm not really willing to spend a zillion dollars trying to build such machines. Sure, 50 bucks, that I'll spend. But not, say, $3000 for PIII based components or $1500 for AMD based. (I love Amd)
I've been lurking about on ebay and I've found that 386 and 486 machines could easily be built for less than $100. Unfortunately, I'm moving soon and won't be able to bid on any of *those* particular machines/processors. But, I still think this could potentially make a great business, of sorts. Art-deco machines which are hooked to monitors which display things which are themed to the look of the machine. A wooden box running Enlightenment with a 'wooden' theme. A box which is covered in fur running some sort of Furby theme. Or, a box made of brushed-looking metal which has a sort of 'industrial' theme.
Further, Imagine the amazing stuff you could do with $1000, some time, and Beowulf or HA!? A high-availability cluster of 10 486s serving static web pages may sound vaguely lame... Until you consider that they could probably handle 25,000,000 pageviews a month. That's a whole lotta pages.
But, before I can implement any of these ideas, I need the machines. If any of you need to ditch old machines and want to put them to being an artistic expression using Beowulf/HA/Linux, drop me a line.
Hrm. I believe I may have broken it. The first thing I tried was to try and cause a buffer overflow. telnet windows2000test.com Connected... GET/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home /home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home[.... ]
I didn't count the number of/home's I sent, but it eventually puked a bit on me, and disconnected me without saying much. After that, my connections were refused as if I'd broken the IIS. Ooops.:) Still, it didn't give me any access, which is pretty decent, I suppose. The other possibility is that it blocks IPs for silly requests, which means there are some arbitrary limits on requests from an IIS. As far as I know, you can do the above to apache, and it just dumps a 404 page...
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is, by it's very nature, not a location-specific sort of thing. Why wouldn't every ISP in Sweeden simply pack up and move to Norway? They keep their traffic, keep their design, keep their cookies, and all they have to do is live in lovely Norway.
Actually, I got engaged to my girlfriend with a ring she already had and wore frequently. Then, we went to the store to pick out her _real_ engagement ring. She and I agree on a lot of things politically, and we both hate DeBeers, that's for sure. They kill way the hell too many people. So, we got a lab-created Sapphire ring that was really nice and only about $120 with insurance.
:) A Sapphire does that just as well as a diamond.
I think the symbol is way more important than the stone. It matters more that you give her a ring and she wears it on her left ring finger than that it has a diamond in it. Really, the purpose of an engagement ring is as a promise and as a symbol to people who might hit on her that she's taken.
The major problem with a cashless culture is that, by definition, it's not physical enough in a time of panic.
:)
Back around the Y2K scare, the Federal Reserve printed up unbelievable assloads of physical cash. We're talking on the order of $300 _billion_ physical dollars. The reason was that they were preparing for a bank panic in which loads of people who go to the ATM and try to get cash out. If we all attempted to take our physical cash home without it being there.. Well, total chaos would ensue.
The big problem with a cashless society is that people feel much safer having a hard, physical object they can place their hand directly on and say "This is value" during a time of crisis.
(Note that this used to be true of gold. Perhaps we should go back to that: Every family has a few pounds of gold laying around, just in case of major emergencies!
What so many people fail to realize is that bio-engineering of foods has been going on for centuries. Ever heard of cross-breeding plants? Or selective breeding of everything from petunias to cows? Why do you think farmers try to get their biggest, strongest bulls to mate with their best milk-producing cows? So they'll get bigger cows that produce more milk.
Genetic manipulation of thousands of species has been going on since before the industrial revoloution. So, if you think it's right or justifiable to burn someone's property because they're doing genetic manipulation, perhaps you should go ahead and burn every farm in the world and drive us all into famine.
--Me
I've been intrested in real estate investment lately, but everytime I try to find information which relates to the actual nitty-gritty details of things like purchasing forclosures or properly valuing homes or land, I hit a brick wall of "And we'll tell you for just 37 easy payments of 29.99!"
Anyone know where I can get good, detailed information that topic?
The largest problem I see with the United States today is people just like this guy. People who are anti-freedom. Allow me to explain:
Too many people I see posting here are constantly claiming that the constitution was designed to make government efficent or to make laws which kept the courts from being constantly clogged with questions regarding a few of the same facts. It's simply not true. The First Amendment is there to protect people like Drudge, whether you like him or not. It's there to protect the writings of Jefferson just as much as it's there to protect Penthouse, whether you like it or not. It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law except in cases where somebody somewhere might be offended or believe something which isn't in the intrests of some group or other." It says "Congress shall make no law".
The idea here was not content restrictions, it was regulation restriction. It's there to keep Republicans from silencing Democrats and Democrats from silencing Republicans and to keep both of them from silencing me.
I noticed in one post someone said the constitution was outdated, that Jefferson had never seen a machine gun. I wholeheartedly disagree. If Jefferson were alive today, he'd want every single last citizen to own an M16 and a bullet proof vest. Not for hunting, not for shooting sports. No, the reason he laid out was simple: To shoot police and soldiers. To fight a revolution. To defend ourselves from the State.
And now we have lots and lots of guys like this. People who proclaim the "public good" (whatever the hell that is) must be upheld, no matter what. If that means I can't write this piece because I refrence revolution, so be it. If it means our own state can remove all our freedoms, so be it. If it means our ultimate demise... so be it. For the love of God, think of the Children!
Then there's this bizarre concept of corporate control over our lives. You wanna know where any such control begins? Government control. Look at any industry you believe to be overly controlling and I guarantee it's a heavily regulated industry. The only way such control can possibly exist is if there is government force keeping other companies from coming in and outcompeting (perhaps by offering less 'controlling' policies) those companies. The only solution to this is simple: Remove the power of government to regulate these companies (with the exception of keeping them from phyiscal force and outright fraud, just as it would with any citizen) and these companies will have no reason to pay off senators. They won't be able to do things that their customers don't like, because there will be others there to do things their customers do like. Deregulate and all these problems vanish. Move to a truly constitutional government, and everything will work itself out within a few weeks.
Anything other than such a strict constitutional government is a proposition for antifreedom, anticapitalism, antiwealth, and antilife.
--Me
[wales001@dontspam.aristotle.bomis.com]
(Moderate me up for once!)
The statement you make in this article about software coming out in an hour to remove the ad after download is pretty silly, IMHO. The -exact- same thing could be said about HTML: You just chop out the code for advertisements from the HTML. Think about it: You could get most of them by looking for a which contained solely an img src, with that image being a link, and the whole thing being centered. You could nail almost all ads with that. So, then, why hasn't software come out to do that to HTML, eh?
In fact, you could have central 'black hole' banner ad servers: Once per day, there's a big tar.gz released of regular expressions (perl or sed style) to edit the banner-ads of the day from HTML. That way, doubleclick or whoever couldn't just keep updating their HTML to keep you from knocking it out, as people would look at the ad and put up a regex to handle it, and they'd only get about 4,000 impressions on that ad before it vanished from the 'net.<br><br>
Therefore, history implies that such software would not come out in reality.
Why's the guy a kook exactly? His ideals seem quite sound to me, as they match mine almost exactly.
You know, you mention the freedom of speech here. In the past, the supreme court has upheld never really made *any* decisions based on 'Copyright Violation Restriction' of speech. They don't seem to have made any claims that speaking in a factual manner about a copyrighted thing would constitute an unprotected form of expression. The closest thing I can find is a 1964 defamation ruling which involved several factual errors. *Factual* errors. Which implies 2 things. First, that I can always say "Fuck microsoft, they suck [figuratively] donkey balls, so does their stinkin software". I am expressing opinion. I can also say "CmdrTaco is one ugly fella". Again, expressing an opinion and the burden of proof is not on my shoulders, as it would require self-censorship and too great a restriction on speech. Secondly, that I can *always* say "I've had Windows 2000 crash on me 7 times in the last 3 weeks", if I have in fact had it crash on me. (And, in many situations, even if I haven't)
I could not, however, state that: "Microsoft chairman Bill Gates steals cars. I saw him do it." unless I could back that up. I could claim he does it without saying I had seen him, thus chalking it up to 'journalisitc factual error' which the supreme court grants happens from time to time.
It is of great intrest as well, that the supreme court has always looked to limit speech and expression in as few ways as possible. That is to say, if you've commited some act of expression which presents a "Clear and present danger" to the general peace, you can be stopped. If, for instance, I were to hold a rally in which I ordered those at said rally to... say.. blow up a building, then the cops -could- rush in and stop me. But, they could not stop me from intimating this without directly saying it, because it would be an unreasonable and too-large restriction on speech. See the supreme court descisions on the first amendment by topic at: Findlaw's constitutional descisions page.
Given that all of this is true, I'd say you should wait for it to go to court, see if you win in the first court (you probably won't) and then instantly get a writ of certiary for the Supreme Court based on first amendment issues. Bust this badboy before it goes any further. Anyway, as an act of Civil Disobedience and rejecting Microsoft's right to tell me I can't say it, I would like to now say these things:
1> Microsoft Authorization Data Specification v1.0 for Microsoft Windows 2000 is, in my opinion, a badly written piece of software, based on no evidence but my opinion that Microsoft produces nothing but badly written software.
2> Microsoft produces nothing, in my opinion, but bad software. Excel is the only exception to this opinion. Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows NT, Microsoft Windows 2000, and MS-DOS all suck. They are all, in my opinion, bad software and should all be deleted from every machine on earth.
Those are constitutionally protected statements. If they want someone, let them come for me.
--Sagev, Freedom Fighter vegas@my.bomis.com
It seems to me that since pi =~ 3.14159, that the real Pi day can only come along once per century. And the next one shoul be coming up March 14, 2016 (3-14-16). Or, better yet, we're a few centuries late: Seems the -real- pi day shoulda been 3-14-1592. And, of course, in 13,000 or so years, we'll possibly have 3-14-15926. Maybe if nanotech and virus-creation technology devlop fast enough, I'll live to see it. :)
I'm sorry good sir, but bomis.com has owned that patent for quite some time. See the press release of September 27, 1999: http://bomis.snap.com/about/pressreleases/990927.h tml.
I agree. I figure it's only a matter of time before the crackdown begins, though. So, that's a good thing at least. Hopefully whoever is pulling this off will go to prison for a long long long time.
<i>The opinions expressed are my own, no one elses. The email address is an anonymous one, but I do read it from time to time.</i>
I used to work for www.bomis.com. Here's what I would suggest: Get yourself a relatively cheap machine to start out. A nice little Athlon 600 with 256M of RAM and a 4.8GB HDD. That'll give you plenty of space for content and such a box will handle zillions (well, a few million) pageviews. You don't need to go with the big $50,000 enterprise-class, Quad-Xeon with 2TB of RAM machines. Get your domainname, promote promote promote promote. Be -very- attentive to your users. Always design in a way that you can move the entire thing to another machine with another domainname just by changing a couple config files. Never hard code in any addresses. Think long and hard about traffic direction. You want a way to say: 'Send 30% of traffic to box 1, and Send 25% to box 2, and Box 3 is a stud, so send the remaining 45% to him.' Also, if you're going to have anything searchable, try to write a way to have a database in some central location. Where be it an NFS or a database server.. just try to make sure you can access the database on multiple machines. Or, at least, write a cron to drag it to machine 2 when you add a machine 2. Write everything to regrow itself. Have cron jobs that rebuild everything for you. If your /home/httpd/html/ directory gets rm -Rf'd, it should rebuild itself. If such happened to Bomis, Bomis would simply heal. --Johnny Wales Developer, Bomis Browser Developer, Bomis Webmail
I live in Huntsville, AL. I'm a software engineer who's still working on a degree, with about 2 years experience (workforce) or 11 years (since I started hacking around in QBasic. :) ). I get $20/hr.
--me
If software Entrepeneurs are restricted by the GPL, then how does RedHat exist?
If I want to package a bunch of GPL software onto a CD and sell that CD, then that's legal, isn't it? (as long as I include the source) And, if I want to write my own proprietary software using GPLd code, then I'm basically stealing. No different from running a warez site. So, I don't see a problem there. Heck, I plan on making some money with an Idea I have involving free code.
--Me
wales001@my.bomis.com
I was planning on beginning work on this sometime next week, oddly. I've expanded heavily on the idea, and I think that making sure they're all GPL isn't all that important. BSD license would be fine. Code without a license would also be fine. Basically, what you'd need to worry about is whether or not it's freely redistributable.
:)
Obviously, one wouldn't want to put up the source distrobution of Sun's JDK. Sun's community license prohibits it, and Sun would probably come yell at you. If, on the other hand, you find a piece of code that has as a license header:
'Hope this code is useful to you. Enjoy'
Then you -can- post that, since the author clearly doesn't much care what his code is used for.
Now all I need are ideas for domainnames.
--Sagev
wales001@my.bomis.com
At the last company I worked for, we used the names of Philosophers for our servers. There's Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, and a new one (www4 right now, I'm fighting for it to be Ayn.. After Ayn Rand) But, this is a -huge- bank of names to draw upon. -Me
100Mbs isn't really a good data transfer rate. Assuming I'm reading it right (100 megabits per second.. I think megabytes per second would be MBps). Current EIDE/UDMA drives get about 11 MBps. And this is only 10MBps? (Note: hdparm -t /dev/hda3 tells me my drive is currently doing 11.35 MBps.) If it is 100MBps, well... then.. bathe it and bring it before me.
As a slight side note, I gotta say I think all the talk of this being vaporware is kinda silly. Firstly, so what if it is? You'll go on living in your day to day 6.3GB world and be as happy as the proverbial clam. Secondly, why would they do that? Do they have any competitors to crush by doing it? Do they really stand to gain anything with it? No. Investors would want to see a prototype in action before they'd give it any money, and all the big tech companies have bigtime badass doctors of engineering to go over the reports they've been given and see if it's feasible.
--Me
Well, Tony, you make a good point. Here's my only counter argument: In the GNU Manifesto, RMS makes quite a lot of noise about software patents and any sort of legal ownership of 'knowledge'. Which is to say, of course, code. I disagree with that thought. Like it or not, we wouldn't be where we are if Microsoft hadn't produced an easy to use (relatively) set of software. We wouldn't be where we are if the world had been GPL from the beginning. Computers would have been tools of research only, instead of the game/office/productivity/information platform it is now. There, I've said it. Microsoft *caused* the beginnings of our revoloution when it came into existance. Without microsoft, None of this would exist, and there would be no community to write linux because computers would still be mammoth things which are used only for number crunching.
Secondly, I *totally* disagree that a true free market is an impossible ideal. I also *totally* disagree with the idea that communism is in any way -ideal-. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Communism and Socialism are evil, and Marx was a raving lunatic.
But, that goes outside the scope of this post. If you care to argue the finer points of political and economic theroy, drop me a line. Until then, visit Free-Market.net.
--Vegas@my.bomis.com
--wales001@my.bomis.com
--Sagev
Man, oh man. This article highlights something which I've always disliked about the GNU/Stallman way of thinking. It seems to claim that greed is a bad thing and a negative thing. That anywhere money goes, evil must follow. I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment of the situation. Greed means competition, and competition means advancement. One of the major things that will a selling point to a lot of people here at slashdot and you crazy GNU communists will be whether or not a particular distrobution is 100% open source. As a result, the 'greedy' competitors in the linux market will be sure to release their changes as open source... Sacrificing their hard fought code to the community so the community will buy their product. Believe it or not, market forces are a Good Thing. Greed is a good thing. Communism is a Bad Thing.
By this, I don't mean you shouldn't assist the community, I mean people should stop whining and moaning whenever someone does something *other* than that. Caldera wants to release a closed-source GUI install doowhang? Fine, sounds like a good idea to me. I won't complain. But, all Red Hat or SuSE would need to do to beat them would be to release the same utility as an Open Source doowhang. And this applies to everything. Their greed will force them to do what we, the consumers, want.
Bah. Linux isn't gonna blow up or be 'pushed to ship' until Linus or Alan decide that they want to be owned by one of the major competitors. Lets not forget that Linux develops at the speed and in the direction that the community wishes it to, not the major companies. The best they can hope for is to contribute code and thus become liked by the core developers.
--Me
This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while now: Artistic computers. Yesterday's article about plexiglas cases was pretty nifty, but I had been thinking about cases made out of other stuff. Wood, for instance. And what about a furry router? Or a mail server with spikes sticking out of it? These could all be great machines, except for a minor detail: I'm not really willing to spend a zillion dollars trying to build such machines. Sure, 50 bucks, that I'll spend. But not, say, $3000 for PIII based components or $1500 for AMD based. (I love Amd)
I've been lurking about on ebay and I've found that 386 and 486 machines could easily be built for less than $100. Unfortunately, I'm moving soon and won't be able to bid on any of *those* particular machines/processors. But, I still think this could potentially make a great business, of sorts. Art-deco machines which are hooked to monitors which display things which are themed to the look of the machine. A wooden box running Enlightenment with a 'wooden' theme. A box which is covered in fur running some sort of Furby theme. Or, a box made of brushed-looking metal which has a sort of 'industrial' theme.
Further, Imagine the amazing stuff you could do with $1000, some time, and Beowulf or HA!? A high-availability cluster of 10 486s serving static web pages may sound vaguely lame... Until you consider that they could probably handle 25,000,000 pageviews a month. That's a whole lotta pages.
But, before I can implement any of these ideas, I need the machines. If any of you need to ditch old machines and want to put them to being an artistic expression using Beowulf/HA/Linux, drop me a line.
vegas@my.bomis.com, wales001@my.bomis.com
--Johnny Wales
Drat it all.... I meant for that to say 'telnet windows2000test.com 80'.
Ah well, I'm sure you could have figured it out.
Hrm. I believe I may have broken it. The first thing I tried was to try and cause a buffer overflow. telnet windows2000test.com /home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home /home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home /home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home/home[.... ]
/home's I sent, but it eventually puked a bit on me, and disconnected me without saying much. After that, my connections were refused as if I'd broken the IIS. Ooops. :)
Connected...
GET
I didn't count the number of
Still, it didn't give me any access, which is pretty decent, I suppose. The other possibility is that it blocks IPs for silly requests, which means there are some arbitrary limits on requests from an IIS. As far as I know, you can do the above to apache, and it just dumps a 404 page...