What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster.
It costs ten times as much because it comes with a sheet of paper.
Not a spectacularly amazing sheet of paper, it has to be said. But a sheet of paper that confirms that the chip is specced to handle a lot more abuse than anything available in the commodity market, a sheet of paper that says "You want to use this in applications where lives are at stake? Where if it goes wrong, someone is more-or-less guaranteed to die? No problem!".
You look at the paper for ordinary consumer chips - it normally says the exact opposite.
As far as "wasted tax money" goes? Well, yeah... okay, I will concede that there is an element of waste here, but it is not enough to get angry over.
I am angry over every unnecessary expenditure.
Being as the government has already decided it wants the information suppressed, the only question is how would they do it. In some countries, I have no doubt the government would simply order the publisher to hand over the books with no compensation. You'll note that they didn't do that here.
The publisher decides how many copies the first print run gets, and unless it's a very well known author who's more-or-less guaranteed to get to the top of the bestseller lists immediately after publication (think the Terry Pratchetts of this world), there's no chance they'll order a massive print run.
He's a multimillionaire, he started out with an ice-cream van and today has a whole load of business interests. By his own admission, he didn't screw people over - most of his wealth once he sold the ice-cream van came from buying land that someone wanted to sell, paying builders who wanted to build, setting up a business in his new building and selling the business along with the building when he'd had enough of it.
Richard Branson? He openly admits in "Business Stripped Bare" that while not all of his businesses have worked out, he's always ensured that all the creditors were paid before he closed the companies down. Yet he didn't have to do that, the whole point of a limited company is that if it all goes to pot, you can walk away.
Gordon Ramsay? He started out by screwing over Marco Pierre-White, that's true. And he appears to have very little patience for anyone who doesn't have his passion. But if you look at how he's structured his businesses, the head chef in each restaurant is also the patron, and therefore directly enjoys the benefit of how well the restaurant does.
EULA aren't legal. They may seem legal, but they aren't.
Erm... I'm afraid they are. EULAs (or at least clauses within them) have been upheld by a number of courts worldwide. Just google for "eula upheld" and of the first 10 results, 8 discuss EULAs which have been upheld. (Of the 2 which don't, 1 links to a page which discusses a case where an EULA has been upheld, the other is someone on a forum who has looked at a case of employment law and tried to apply it to consumer law).
I play EQ2 and Sony's EULA says I can't use 3rd party software. Which means, my keyboard driver, my video driver, my video card extra software, is all illegal to run while I'm playing EQ2.
Of course, I go further, with innerspace and isxeq2 so I can script & bot the game to my hearts content.
EULA? Fuck you, take me to court and we'll see.
You know, while IANAL I really would love to see you argue that "this clause is nonsensical and therefore the entire EULA is invalid" in court. Last time I checked, "Fuck you" wasn't generally considered a winning legal argument.
I wouldn't say that's entirely fair, because if you ignore a speeding ticket they can and will take you to court and sting you. Countless people can attest to this.
It's more like the private parking companies that issue "tickets" in car parks on private land (eg. supermarkets, leisure and retail parks) - these companies will send you a series of rude letters demanding about £60 for a "fine" because you were in the car park for 5 minutes too long - and if you don't pay up they'll take you to court, take your belongings and hump your cat.
There's only one minor problem.
Under UK law, private companies can't issue fines. Only the government can. Needless to say, very few people get taken to court and the few that lose do so because they didn't enter a defence.
What if I don't use the ISPs awful DNS servers? How will I be redirected to the notification page? I couldn't possibly have had a chance to change my behavior if I was never informed of my wrongdoing in the first place.
How long before ISPs start invisibly proxying all DNS requests to their own DNS servers, regardless of what DNS servers you point your home network at? It really would be trivially easy, and I don't see anyone operating DNS-over-SSL.
I don't see why I shouldn't pay considerably less for an electronic book. There's no physical item to manufacture, no shipping costs - and while the IT costs of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure to sell me the book go up, I'll put money on it they don't go up anywhere near as much as the other costs go down. It's not like a CD where you're likely only interested in a handful of tracks and the rest are filler, so you can save money by not buying the filler tracks. Chances are you want the whole book, particularly if it's fiction.
It's not just that, though. We've all heard about Amazon revoking books they'd already sold and I want no part of that - frankly, it's no different from Stallman's old chestnut, "The Right to Read". I didn't start buying music online until I could buy it in a non-proprietary format that wasn't DRM-encumbered, and I take the exact same approach to books.
I think it's fair to say Alzheimer's research is getting a lot more press than it was getting even three years ago - before Sir Pterry made his announcement. He's done an enormous amount to bring Alzheimer's into the public eye, whereas previously it was the sort of thing people talked about in hushed tones when discussing the fate of an elderly relative, frequently not even daring to say "Alzheimer".
That alone has probably brought in more money for Alzheimer's research than anything else. Frankly, it's high time too. It's a cruel, cruel condition that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Not only does the sufferer slowly lose their mind, but their relatives get a ringside seat watching it happen in a sort of morbid horror show, unable to do a great deal but see the person they love die while their body keeps going.
While it's possible to mount a criminal prosecution privately, it's very expensive and quite difficult. The police have already washed their hands of the matter, claiming it's a civil dispute. (Myself I don't see how - the dog was reported stolen some time ago, he's since found evidence to suggest it's still alive and in the possession of someone else, but AFAICT "It's a civil dispute" is often used as code to mean "We the police don't want to get involved").
They do exactly the same thing in the UK - we have a legal framework which companies towing vehicles are supposed to follow, but it's frequently abused and generally misunderstood by the police.
Put it this way, it's quite common to find your vehicle's been taken illegally, and the police response is almost invariably "that's a civil matter, Sir". 9 times out of 10, you either need to get an injunction against the company that towed away your car to return it or you pay to retrieve it and then sue them for the money. (They seldom honour court judgements and never have any assets for a bailiff to take, so you usually have to include the person who instructed them as well).
Most people know nothing about the legal framework bit and probably pay up with little fuss, so in essence it is exactly the same thing.
I said that most F/OSS CMS systems are horrifically insecure. (They are. Debian doesn't provide packages for most, for precisely this reason. The poor bugger managing the packages would have a full-time job).
I didn't say anything about what might be more secure. A low-profile site running an in-house developed CMS may never get hacked simply because the CMS is too different to everything else to be caught out by automated tools and the site is too low-profile to attract individual attention. That doesn't mean their CMS is secure, it just means they've been lucky.
Don't forget insecure. Most of them have so many exploits discovered on an almost weekly basis - and those exploits frequently have implications for templates and plugins - that you simply can't manage such a website without spending a significant chunk of time on maintenance.
Every hour you spend dealing with that is an hour you're not spending updating content and presentation (the same content and presentation that your employer notices and thinks is all they're paying you for).
(Yes, the website in my sig is running Drupal. And as soon as I get around to it, it will not run Drupal).
Lots of projects use MySQL by default, though that's probably more for historical reasons these days. (Postgres used to be way behind in the performance stakes, which means if you're offering hosting and you wanted to offer similar performance to MySQL for your customers you had to purchase a hell of a lot more hardware).
The thing is, it's not uncommon with MySQL to find that in order to get everything working just so, you have to fight the damn thing. Foreign keys weren't properly supported for years, and even today you have to explicitly use non-standard SQL syntax or the engine silently throws them away.
Once you've used Postgres for any length of time, it's clear that the entire application is designed with one thing foremost: Data integrity. You really have to work to store your data in such a fashion as to lose ACID compliance - I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a Postgres system seriously messed up, and you don't generally get sections of the Postgres manual for the stable version prefaced with warnings like "Look out, while you can do this we haven't really tested it and there may still be bugs that result in serious data loss".
It takes a great deal of determination and will-power on top of blind ignorance to mess up Postgres, whereas with MySQL (even today) it's really rather easy to mess up simply because you didn't turn over the page in the Junior Colour Encyclopaedia of Databases and read the paragraph that says "Here be dragons!".
MySQL fans will say "What are you doing setting up a live database without having at least some familiarity with the manual?". Postgres fans will say "What is the database doing making it so easy to balls it up so royally?".
Problem with that is you immediately lose AD - which (despite some astonishing ignorance on here, mostly from people who don't seem to have ever used a managed Windows domain) is pretty handy and would be very annoying to lose.
And in quite a few companies, you'd wind up firing 20% or more of your workforce. Good luck getting anything done.
This is why Apple are still going, and why Linux on the desktop is always "next year".
Apple see people complaining about something not being easy, and say "Okay, why is that? What can we do to make it easier?". Rather too many developers of F/OSS products (though it's becoming less common these days) take the attitude "If you can't figure it out, I don't care to help you", which is precisely the wrong attitude to take when making a desktop easy to use.
More or less, except that your solution doesn't work very well for laptops.
AFAICT, it would not be too inaccurate to describe the history of desktop computing as "Taking computing power away from the mainframe and to the desktop, followed by doing everything you could to bring control back to a centralised system".
Under the hood, Active Directory is LDAP, Kerberos and DNS (albeit with just enough proprietary guff to stop you swapping it out with F/OSS LDAP, kerberos and DNS stack). Obviously all this does exist in Unix and can be made to work for centralised login.
Thing is, while centralised login is the big thing we all know about and discuss on/., AD does rather more than that. Every Windows PC that's part of an AD domain will periodically query AD for policy information, which can include any one of thousands of settings like printers, desktop background, what users can or can't do on their PCs right the way down to locking down the user interface itself so people can't inadvertently change the wrong setting and wind up with a desktop that no longer works properly.
This is the sort of thing that F/OSS people don't really care about, but businesses do because if every PC is configured more-or-less identically and nailed down, you don't get calls to the helpdesk along the lines of "I can't use my PC because I set the keyboard to Traditional Chinese to see if it would let me!".
They do the same thing at every upgrade, what is your point ? Bad PR for GNU/Linux ?
Except they don't. With Windows upgrades, they have to learn a few new things but by and large it's fairly similar. Face it, Windows Vista was the biggest change to Windows' UI since Windows 95. And even with Windows 7, your existing applications still work and they haven't changed.
Now, if you were to propose rolling out Windows 7 and at the same time rolling out upgrades to every damn application that re-arranged the UI, I guarantee you'd see resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
BT's network reached saturation point years ago.
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster.
200 Mbits/sec is 20 meg download.
It costs ten times as much because it comes with a sheet of paper.
Not a spectacularly amazing sheet of paper, it has to be said. But a sheet of paper that confirms that the chip is specced to handle a lot more abuse than anything available in the commodity market, a sheet of paper that says "You want to use this in applications where lives are at stake? Where if it goes wrong, someone is more-or-less guaranteed to die? No problem!".
You look at the paper for ordinary consumer chips - it normally says the exact opposite.
As far as "wasted tax money" goes? Well, yeah... okay, I will concede that there is an element of waste here, but it is not enough to get angry over.
I am angry over every unnecessary expenditure.
Being as the government has already decided it wants the information suppressed, the only question is how would they do it. In some countries, I have no doubt the government would simply order the publisher to hand over the books with no compensation. You'll note that they didn't do that here.
The publisher decides how many copies the first print run gets, and unless it's a very well known author who's more-or-less guaranteed to get to the top of the bestseller lists immediately after publication (think the Terry Pratchetts of this world), there's no chance they'll order a massive print run.
Duncan Bannatyne immediately springs to mind.
He's a multimillionaire, he started out with an ice-cream van and today has a whole load of business interests. By his own admission, he didn't screw people over - most of his wealth once he sold the ice-cream van came from buying land that someone wanted to sell, paying builders who wanted to build, setting up a business in his new building and selling the business along with the building when he'd had enough of it.
Richard Branson? He openly admits in "Business Stripped Bare" that while not all of his businesses have worked out, he's always ensured that all the creditors were paid before he closed the companies down. Yet he didn't have to do that, the whole point of a limited company is that if it all goes to pot, you can walk away.
Gordon Ramsay? He started out by screwing over Marco Pierre-White, that's true. And he appears to have very little patience for anyone who doesn't have his passion. But if you look at how he's structured his businesses, the head chef in each restaurant is also the patron, and therefore directly enjoys the benefit of how well the restaurant does.
EULA aren't legal. They may seem legal, but they aren't.
Erm... I'm afraid they are. EULAs (or at least clauses within them) have been upheld by a number of courts worldwide. Just google for "eula upheld" and of the first 10 results, 8 discuss EULAs which have been upheld. (Of the 2 which don't, 1 links to a page which discusses a case where an EULA has been upheld, the other is someone on a forum who has looked at a case of employment law and tried to apply it to consumer law).
I play EQ2 and Sony's EULA says I can't use 3rd party software. Which means, my keyboard driver, my video driver, my video card extra software, is all illegal to run while I'm playing EQ2.
Of course, I go further, with innerspace and isxeq2 so I can script & bot the game to my hearts content.
EULA? Fuck you, take me to court and we'll see.
You know, while IANAL I really would love to see you argue that "this clause is nonsensical and therefore the entire EULA is invalid" in court. Last time I checked, "Fuck you" wasn't generally considered a winning legal argument.
I wouldn't say that's entirely fair, because if you ignore a speeding ticket they can and will take you to court and sting you. Countless people can attest to this.
It's more like the private parking companies that issue "tickets" in car parks on private land (eg. supermarkets, leisure and retail parks) - these companies will send you a series of rude letters demanding about £60 for a "fine" because you were in the car park for 5 minutes too long - and if you don't pay up they'll take you to court, take your belongings and hump your cat.
There's only one minor problem.
Under UK law, private companies can't issue fines. Only the government can. Needless to say, very few people get taken to court and the few that lose do so because they didn't enter a defence.
What if I don't use the ISPs awful DNS servers? How will I be redirected to the notification page? I couldn't possibly have had a chance to change my behavior if I was never informed of my wrongdoing in the first place.
How long before ISPs start invisibly proxying all DNS requests to their own DNS servers, regardless of what DNS servers you point your home network at? It really would be trivially easy, and I don't see anyone operating DNS-over-SSL.
what makes you think this guy is going to be in jail any time close to 12 years?
AFAIK they don't generally keep people in prison after they're dead, so I'd agree with that.
I would imagine the main difference in costs is that Netflix don't need to pay rent and upkeep on thousands of stores and all the staff that implies.
I don't see why I shouldn't pay considerably less for an electronic book. There's no physical item to manufacture, no shipping costs - and while the IT costs of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure to sell me the book go up, I'll put money on it they don't go up anywhere near as much as the other costs go down. It's not like a CD where you're likely only interested in a handful of tracks and the rest are filler, so you can save money by not buying the filler tracks. Chances are you want the whole book, particularly if it's fiction.
It's not just that, though. We've all heard about Amazon revoking books they'd already sold and I want no part of that - frankly, it's no different from Stallman's old chestnut, "The Right to Read". I didn't start buying music online until I could buy it in a non-proprietary format that wasn't DRM-encumbered, and I take the exact same approach to books.
I think it's fair to say Alzheimer's research is getting a lot more press than it was getting even three years ago - before Sir Pterry made his announcement. He's done an enormous amount to bring Alzheimer's into the public eye, whereas previously it was the sort of thing people talked about in hushed tones when discussing the fate of an elderly relative, frequently not even daring to say "Alzheimer".
That alone has probably brought in more money for Alzheimer's research than anything else. Frankly, it's high time too. It's a cruel, cruel condition that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Not only does the sufferer slowly lose their mind, but their relatives get a ringside seat watching it happen in a sort of morbid horror show, unable to do a great deal but see the person they love die while their body keeps going.
This is the UK, not the US.
While it's possible to mount a criminal prosecution privately, it's very expensive and quite difficult. The police have already washed their hands of the matter, claiming it's a civil dispute. (Myself I don't see how - the dog was reported stolen some time ago, he's since found evidence to suggest it's still alive and in the possession of someone else, but AFAICT "It's a civil dispute" is often used as code to mean "We the police don't want to get involved").
They do exactly the same thing in the UK - we have a legal framework which companies towing vehicles are supposed to follow, but it's frequently abused and generally misunderstood by the police.
Put it this way, it's quite common to find your vehicle's been taken illegally, and the police response is almost invariably "that's a civil matter, Sir". 9 times out of 10, you either need to get an injunction against the company that towed away your car to return it or you pay to retrieve it and then sue them for the money. (They seldom honour court judgements and never have any assets for a bailiff to take, so you usually have to include the person who instructed them as well).
Most people know nothing about the legal framework bit and probably pay up with little fuss, so in essence it is exactly the same thing.
I said that most F/OSS CMS systems are horrifically insecure. (They are. Debian doesn't provide packages for most, for precisely this reason. The poor bugger managing the packages would have a full-time job).
I didn't say anything about what might be more secure. A low-profile site running an in-house developed CMS may never get hacked simply because the CMS is too different to everything else to be caught out by automated tools and the site is too low-profile to attract individual attention. That doesn't mean their CMS is secure, it just means they've been lucky.
Don't forget insecure. Most of them have so many exploits discovered on an almost weekly basis - and those exploits frequently have implications for templates and plugins - that you simply can't manage such a website without spending a significant chunk of time on maintenance.
Every hour you spend dealing with that is an hour you're not spending updating content and presentation (the same content and presentation that your employer notices and thinks is all they're paying you for).
(Yes, the website in my sig is running Drupal. And as soon as I get around to it, it will not run Drupal).
Crash-proof planes? Is that like an unsinkable cruise ship?
I believe there were some shipbuilders working in Belfast in the early 20th century you might want to speak to.
Lots of projects use MySQL by default, though that's probably more for historical reasons these days. (Postgres used to be way behind in the performance stakes, which means if you're offering hosting and you wanted to offer similar performance to MySQL for your customers you had to purchase a hell of a lot more hardware).
The thing is, it's not uncommon with MySQL to find that in order to get everything working just so, you have to fight the damn thing. Foreign keys weren't properly supported for years, and even today you have to explicitly use non-standard SQL syntax or the engine silently throws them away.
Once you've used Postgres for any length of time, it's clear that the entire application is designed with one thing foremost: Data integrity. You really have to work to store your data in such a fashion as to lose ACID compliance - I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a Postgres system seriously messed up, and you don't generally get sections of the Postgres manual for the stable version prefaced with warnings like "Look out, while you can do this we haven't really tested it and there may still be bugs that result in serious data loss".
It takes a great deal of determination and will-power on top of blind ignorance to mess up Postgres, whereas with MySQL (even today) it's really rather easy to mess up simply because you didn't turn over the page in the Junior Colour Encyclopaedia of Databases and read the paragraph that says "Here be dragons!".
MySQL fans will say "What are you doing setting up a live database without having at least some familiarity with the manual?". Postgres fans will say "What is the database doing making it so easy to balls it up so royally?".
Problem with that is you immediately lose AD - which (despite some astonishing ignorance on here, mostly from people who don't seem to have ever used a managed Windows domain) is pretty handy and would be very annoying to lose.
And in quite a few companies, you'd wind up firing 20% or more of your workforce. Good luck getting anything done.
This is why Apple are still going, and why Linux on the desktop is always "next year".
Apple see people complaining about something not being easy, and say "Okay, why is that? What can we do to make it easier?". Rather too many developers of F/OSS products (though it's becoming less common these days) take the attitude "If you can't figure it out, I don't care to help you", which is precisely the wrong attitude to take when making a desktop easy to use.
More or less, except that your solution doesn't work very well for laptops.
AFAICT, it would not be too inaccurate to describe the history of desktop computing as "Taking computing power away from the mainframe and to the desktop, followed by doing everything you could to bring control back to a centralised system".
Under the hood, Active Directory is LDAP, Kerberos and DNS (albeit with just enough proprietary guff to stop you swapping it out with F/OSS LDAP, kerberos and DNS stack). Obviously all this does exist in Unix and can be made to work for centralised login.
Thing is, while centralised login is the big thing we all know about and discuss on /., AD does rather more than that. Every Windows PC that's part of an AD domain will periodically query AD for policy information, which can include any one of thousands of settings like printers, desktop background, what users can or can't do on their PCs right the way down to locking down the user interface itself so people can't inadvertently change the wrong setting and wind up with a desktop that no longer works properly.
This is the sort of thing that F/OSS people don't really care about, but businesses do because if every PC is configured more-or-less identically and nailed down, you don't get calls to the helpdesk along the lines of "I can't use my PC because I set the keyboard to Traditional Chinese to see if it would let me!".
They do the same thing at every upgrade, what is your point ? Bad PR for GNU/Linux ?
Except they don't. With Windows upgrades, they have to learn a few new things but by and large it's fairly similar. Face it, Windows Vista was the biggest change to Windows' UI since Windows 95. And even with Windows 7, your existing applications still work and they haven't changed.
Now, if you were to propose rolling out Windows 7 and at the same time rolling out upgrades to every damn application that re-arranged the UI, I guarantee you'd see resistance.