It was recently announced that Olympic gold medals are awarded to physically fit people, Baseball Hall of Fame entries are awarded to good baseball players, and the Nebula Award is given to really good science fiction authors.
People in the entire U.S., but especially the editors at Slashdot, were astounded and amazed by this announcement.
"I never even suspected" said chrisd, an editor at Slashdot.
The Dow rose 78 points today, largely in response to this announcement.
It doesn't matter if Adobe had a change of heart. The Feds would have had to have done the same exact thing either way. Otherwise they lose their shiny little law. That's all I'm saying.
Perhaps they would. But perhaps they wouldn't. If Adobe actually didn't want them to prosecute then they would have gotten one or more members of Congress or the Senate involved, if not a number of people in the Executive branch. At that point, I think it's likely that the Feds would have found some excuse to release Dmitry.
And why would the Feds care one way about their shiny new law?
The answer, of course, is because corporations like Adobe pay them to (whether directly to the officials or indirectly through campaign contributions to the guys in charge, it's all the same).
Windows server licenses charges are not recurring charges. You don't have to pay anybody if you want to continue using the same software you currently use.
Ah, I see. So if I want to upgrade my operating system from NT4 to Win2k (because Win2k contains bugfixes, among other things, that I require for continued operation), I don't have to pay anything?
Uh huh. That's what I thought.
Windows server license fees are non-recurring in name only. In practice, they are recurring, and that's all that matters to the bottom line.
And if you believe otherwise, then explain to us why the vast, vast majority of shops upgraded from NT 3.51, and why many of them upgraded from NT 4. You simply don't go through that kind of pain unless it's for a damned good reason.
Explain to us how to run (as an example) SQL Server 2000 (or even SQL Server 7) under NT 3.51. Oh, I can't? I see. So if I suddenly want to run a Microsoft database on my NT 3.51 server box, I have to upgrade to at least NT 4? Right. That means it's OS upgrade time, which means paying for a new OS license, even if I don't want to upgrade my OS.
Oh, one other thing. So many people (you're probably included in this list) claim that the reason for buying Microsoft is that they support their products. Pray tell, how exactly are you going to get support for NT 3.51 from them? Are they going to support it to the degree necessary to get SQL Server 2000 going on it? Didn't think so.
Product end of life is something everyone has to deal with sooner or later, so the only way software license fees won't be recurring is if the upgrades are all free. And that's just not the case with any flavor of Windows that I know of, and certainly not the case with any of their server offerings.
A Windows server license will cost you a few thousand bucks, depending on configuration. That's a one-time charge.
It's not a one-time charge. You get charged at least that amount every time you need to upgrade the box to a newer version of the OS.
How many people here never upgrade the OS on their servers, never replace their servers with newer hardware, etc.? Thought so.
Windows server license charges are recurring charges. The only thing that varies is the duration.
Still, your point that the server license fees are small compared with the maintenance fees is somewhat valid. The problem is that you're paying someone to maintain the system regardless, so the difference in acquisition cost isn't as easy to ignore as you would have us believe. And remember: the money you don't spend on server license fees is money you can spend on other things, like more hardware. Ultimately the question is which OS gives you the most value for your money, and Linux wins that one hands down most of the time.
Here is a real solid fact:
Based on the number of attempts and system penetration MS products are 20% more likely to be hacked and infected than Linux. This is a basic arithmetic case of market share. If 60% of the targets are red and the other 40% are blue. Red is 20% more likely to be targeted than blue. It's that simple.
MS products might be 20% more likely to be infected than Linux just based on the rollout numbers, but experience repeatedly shows that MS products in the real world are infected much more often than that.
Now, that 20% difference you speak of may be limited only to exploitation of bugs, but to limit your comparison only to that is the same sort of mistake you accuse the authors of the paper of. You can't just limit yourself to exploitation of bugs, you have to include exploitation of design flaws as well, and that is where Microsoft products typically fall on their face. Whether it's automatic execution of malicious code during a document preview in the explorer (or Outlook) or an install program that doesn't make you change the sa SQL server password, Microsoft has consistently shown that basic security is something of an afterthought to it. If they're changing that, then good for them! It's about time.
But until they start actually designing their products with as much consideration of security as of useability, Linux will maintain a significant advantage over Windows in resistance to attacks.
Now we're killing the last Windows desktops,
putting Lindows-OS in their place.
That's gonna work really well until the rest of the world moves
to the next version of Office.
Perhaps. It depends a great deal on how often his business sends
and receives MS document files outside of the company. My observation
is that most of the use of Office is for internal documents, and for that
OpenOffice will work very nicely even if MS decides to go to a new document
format.
Yeah, Open Office runs WAY better, can do more, is easier to install
and maintain than MS Office (not). MYSQL is MUCH better (and easier to work
with) than DB2, Oracle, or SQL Server (not).
OpenOffice only has to run well enough and do enough. There are
probably a few things that Office will do that OpenOffice cannot, but I'd
bet that those things are very esoteric. As it is, OpenOffice will
do quite a lot, including things like embedding spreadsheets and other objects.
The one killer app Office has is Outlook, but even that isn't irreplaceable:
there's Evolution on the Linux side.
MySQL is the wrong free database to be using in your comparison because
as database engines go it's not particularly capable (but it's obviously
capable enough for many of the things it's used for. And as with most
Free Software, it's improving over time). Try PostgreSQL instead.
What does your office actually do? Is it a call center? Is it a
server farm? Because that makes all the difference.
Exactly. The type of business determines whether or not the
freely available tools will do the job. What many of us contend is
that the freely available tools are now good enough to do most jobs, and
that Windows is no longer a necessity to nearly the same degree that
it used to be.
Besides, the whole point of Windows is that it's easy to use and even a monkey could manage it, right? That's been the prevailing point that Microsoft has been pushing for years now; it's a little disingenuous to turn around and say "but you can run it as easily as Linux if you invest in equivalent command-line training".
Well, not necessarily. There's a difference between ease of administration and efficiency of administration. Linux walks all over Windows in the second category, but not in the first.
But admittedly, once you get a Linux box set up and operating the way you want it's more or less hands free from there thanks to all the custom automation you can build so easily out of the box.
While reading the posts here I began to wonder something? Is it possible to demand prosecution for a crime?
It sure is! As long as you have enough money and influence. It's what Adobe did to Dmitry Sklyarov, after all (yeah, they later "recanted", but only a moron could have missed the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" between Adobe and the FBI that I strongly suspect happened).
If you do something in front of a police station and tell them it's illegal, I don't think they can really resfuse to prosecute you.
Perhaps, but if they've been bought (very likely, methinks, if we're talking about the DMCA) by interests that don't want to see you prosecuted because your case will lead to the destruction of their pet law, then it's likely that the prosecution will "accidentally" screw up their side of things such that you end up being let off on a technicality. Pet law stays safe, but you end up a lot poorer as a result. They win.
Don't underestimate the abilities of the bad guys here. In the U.S., they're almost invincible because of the sheer amount of money and power they wield.
Right. That's the point everyone was making when the feds went after Dmitri. Adobe said "Oh, nevermind, don't bootfuck him."
But the feds had to keep on keepin' on, 'cause supposedly the law has nothing to do with the desires of the copyright holder.
Well, that's what Adobe and (perhaps) the feds claim. But my bet is that Adobe passed a note to the feds under the table that said "Don't mind what we say in public. Fuck Dmitry hard".
I see little reason to believe that Adobe actually suddenly had this huge change of heart. How naive can you be to believe nonsense like that? I strongly suspect the "change of heart" about Dmitri was only at the PR level.
Second, we may see very soon the beginning of the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. This will also require a lot of new hardware since a large fraction of today's telecommunications network aren't designed to handle IPv6; that means a lot of software upgrades and a lot of upgrades of actual network hardware itself to support IPv6.
You really don't get it, do you?
You won't see a switch en masse to IPv6 or any other such new technology until two things happen:
The current technology no longer actually serves the current needs of most corporations.
The new technology has been deployed and in the field long enough to prove that it can handle the current and likely future needs of most corporations.
Neither of those is true for the IPv6 cutover right now, and I doubt the first one will ever really be true, thanks to NAT and VPNs.
You may see some IPv4 over IPv6 on some of the backbone, but for that to happen routing of IPv6 has to be much easier than routing of IPv4 (or IPv6 has to offer other very compelling advantages over IPv4), and I seriously doubt that's the case.
It is retarded to be protesting over this. Not to ve insensitive to black people, but if you are black and want to get a drink of water, go to the damned coloured fountain and drink there. You can do everything at the coloured fountain that you can at the whites fountain. If you are really this angry about Southwest's white fountain not being usable to blacks, don't give them your business. There are plenty of other airlines with fountains out there.
Except that there is one crucial difference here: in your example, you have to go out of your way to discriminate between blacks and whites: you have to set up a completely separate drinking fountain.
In the case of Southwest's web site, it's exactly the opposite: they would have to go out of their way to not "discriminate" by accomodating the blind person.
My view on this is almost purely practical: is it easier and faster for someone to surf a compliant web site to get at the ticket information he's interested in, or is it easier and faster for him to call their toll-free number and speak to someone directly?
And the answer is that if you're not blind, it's probably easier and faster to surf the web site and get at what you want (depends on how adept you are at operating the computer. Should we now talk about discrimination against people who can't use a computer??), but if you're blind it's easier and faster to call no matter how accomodating the web site is. And that's because visual scanning of information is orders of magnitude faster than audio or tactile scanning of that same information.
Bottom line: it doesn't matter how blind-friendly Southwest makes their web site: it'll still be harder for a blind person to use than the telephone. As long as the rates, schedules, and special offers are identical between the two, the fact that Southwest's web site isn't blind-friendly should not matter.
So no, you can't use the black-versus-white comparison and get away with it. That discrimination is foul because it is based on superficial differences that don't make any real difference. Blind versus sighted is very different, because here we are talking about a true difference in capabilities.
And if you don't believe that, then you must believe that blind people should be allowed to drive, or that they should be allowed to fly personal airplanes. That we don't allow the blind to drive a car or pilot an airplane is "discrimination" of the same kind we're talking about, right?
You have to draw the line somewhere, because there is a real difference between a blind person and a sighted one, and no amount of legal wrangling will change that basic fact.
At some point, the disadvantaged (in whatever way, from being physically disabled in some way to being unable to speak or read the commonly-used language) person has to take some responsibility for dealing with his condition. To insist on anything else leads to absurdities such as requiring all businesses to hire people who can read, write and speak every human language in use on the planet today.
So: you seem to be in favor of forcing Southwest and any other business to make their site "blind-friendly". Are you also in favor of forcing them to do their site up in Cantonese? Arabic? Czech? Finnish? The only reason a blind person can view a web site at all is that he can get his hands on technology that does the translation for him. Are you going to insist that the technology involved be made available for free? Are you going to insist that everyone limit their web site designs to only those that said technology can handle? How far are you willing to go here? At what point do you draw the line? If the translators that blind people obviously use didn't exist, would you then insist that businesses not be able to put up web sites just because blind people couldn't then make use of them?
Enough of all that. The blind person can pick up the phone and get exactly the same results. It's only if he can't get the same deals that he has a legitimate gripe. Otherwise he should convince the vendor of his translator to produce something that can read Southwest's web site.
These issues need to be publicized in a way that reaches the largely non tech public in a way that they can understand the unfair and illegal practices of the recording industry.
Sorry, but that'll never happen in our lifetimes.
It won't happen because the corporations that are behind the DMCA are either the owners of the mass media or have deals with the owners of the mass media to keep information about the negative side of the DMCA off the air.
When are you guys going to figure out that there is no good way to communicate with the masses except through the corporate-controlled mass media? When are you guys going to realize that this is why corporations so completely and utterly control the U.S. government today, and why elected officials today are almost to a man sock-puppets of the corporations (remember: you can't elect someone you don't know about, and someone who isn't sufficiently well-publicized will never be elected, and the mass media is the only way to get enough exposure to matter. Nice racket for the mass media corporations, huh?)?
The corporations have the U.S. locked up so completely that I think the U.S. is beyond help now.
There was at least one private class action lawsuit filed against these record companies for price fixing in 1996. The last I saw (1997), it was still kicking around the courts. In dollar terms, private class action suits can easily exceed the damages they'll pay to settle the government's case.
That may be, but the problem with class action suits is that they are almost always brought in order to benefit the lawyers. It's rare indeed that the actual plaintiffs in such suits gain anything significant from them. Often the plaintiffs end up with a settlement that represents less than what they lost at the hands of the defendant. But the settlement amount is usually large enough that the lawyers representing the plaintiffs make enough to retire to a life of complete luxury.
Remember: the lawyers representing you in a class action lawsuit don't work for you: they work for themselves, and are just using you as a tool to gain for themselves insane amounts of money.
What that means in this case is that if the RIAA offers to settle early for $100 million, the lawyers will probably take the deal, because their cut will be something like 30% of that, and $30 million for a small group of lawyers is a lot of money if the amount of time it represents is small. They know that if they don't take the deal, the RIAA has the resources to drag the case out for decades if need be, so they'll take the deal. And the RIAA is thus still ahead a cool $300 million.
If there's another boot to fall, it'll be something other than a class action lawsuit.
And if you want an idea of the likely long-term outcome, just look at the tobacco companies and how much they were "hurt" in the end (hint: not much) by the class action lawsuits.
What we need now is the Gnome (or KDE) panel set LD_PRELOAD so that all application can use libtrash.
This can be done for Gnome in your $HOME/.gnomerc file, which is just a shell script (I have mine source my.profile so that I can make environment changes in one place).
If Eldred wins in the Supreme Court, then the CTEA gets struck down, right?
What's likely to happen then? Do you guys really think the copyright cartel will take that sitting down?
I think what will happen is that the copyright cartel will bribe Congress into passing another CTEA with an even longer extension (enough to make up the difference in time between the last CTEA and now, at the very least). And then that will go through the legal process and eventually be struck down. And then Congress passes another one.
And another one.
And another one.
Until eventually the SC does not strike it down.
But any way you look at it, if Congress has enough incentive, they can keep passing the same law(s) that the SC keeps striking down, and those laws will have force until they reach the SC.
So what, exactly, prevents Congress from doing what I describe above?
The neat thing about C3s is the temperature: an X86 compatible chip that costs peanuts, runs in common inexpensive socket 370 boards and the little f*ers run so cool they can actually dispense with FANS. (especially when mildly underclocked)
This is true: it makes them a good choice for building a silent PC.
You can do the same thing with a P4 as well, since it'll automatically underclock itself to keep itself from overheating. You'll typically get about half the rated speed (based on my tests with a 1.5GHz CPU) from a P4 when it's got the heatsink on but the fan off.
What you say is true within certain limits, but not as much as you might think.
Do you really think you'd ever see the U.S. government today stepping in and telling two parties in a patent fight that it would not be enforcing any of the patents in question? Not in your lifetime!
The problems we face today are much worse than those in the past, because the bad guys today have a worldwide presence and many times the amount of money and power that they had back in the day.
That's not to say that the problems today are new: they're not. The Roman Empire went through the same thing. The difference is that the Roman Empire had enemies on the outside to topple them, whereas a worldwide police state (which is what we're headed for) wouldn't. Oh, and back in Roman times a group of 100 trained soldiers had perhaps a factor of three or four advantage over a group of 100 civilians, whereas today a group of 100 trained soldiers with modern weapons has more like a factor of a thousand (or a million if you include nukes) advantage. Point being that any civilian uprising in modern times is going to be squashed unless it gets military support.
The American Revolution simply couldn't happen today.
Not that those points aren't well taken, but it it doesn't address the fact that most people don't really want to know the details of whether and how one thing is better than another. They just want to be convinced that it's "good" or "better" or "really good", whatever that thought process takes for em.
True for users. But I thought he was talking strictly about developers. Most developers do want to know the details. They have to know the details, in fact, since that's what makes it possible for them to get the job done.
Lunar industry and colonists will probably always need help from Earth just to stay alive.
And this is exactly why the Moon will probably be the destination for a permanent settlement and Mars will not. Do you really think any earthbound government is going to be stupid enough to allow the formation of an independent colony of people, especially in space (where they would be in a position to throw big rocks at the earth -- not something that could necessarily be done by humans on Mars, but certainly something that could be done by inhabitants of the asteroid belt)?
Governments are interested in control more than anything else. A colony on the Moon would be much easier to control than one on Mars, if only because the government on Earth could threaten to cut off the flow of mandatory supplies to the Moon colony if necessary.
You get failures once a month -- gracefully degrading failovers, no less.
But that's not gracefully degrading failovers of the database, but of page generation. Since it's the database backend we're talking about, failures of that backend count, no matter how such failures are handled by the client code.
I will certainly be the first to admit that MySQL is powerful enough to host Slashdot -- for now. Only time will tell whether that will remain the case. As I said, I suspect it will, if only because of the determination on the part of the Slashdot team to force it to do the job no matter how well or badly suited it may be (because switching to a different database backend probably represents more work in the short term than simply keeping MySQL afloat does).
Re:Slashdot Users Are Pretty Damn Objective
on
IBM, MS Critique MySQL
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In fact, there's so sure it's possible they'll occasionally mention this belief *on* their MySQL-backended, massively scalable dynamic website.
Then why is it that at least once a month I end up getting the static page instead of the (MySQL-backended) dynamically generated one?
It is obviously possible to use MySQL to backend a site such as Slashdot, since they're clearly doing it, but that doesn't mean that MySQL is better suited to the task than any of the alternatives (free or otherwise). You can compensate for a lot of software deficiencies with sufficient sweat and a bit of hardware. I know, I've done it.
And despite Slashdot's success with MySQL, Sourceforge (owned by the very same people that own Slashdot, even!) was essentially forced to convert to PostgreSQL due to the limitations of this very same engine that Slashdot successfully uses.
The real question isn't whether or not MySQL can function adequately for Slashdot right now. It clearly can, with sufficient effort (and don't mistake me: other, more powerful database engines would require effort, too, but I suspect it wouldn't be quite as much). The real question is whether or not MySQL will continue to function adequately for Slashdot in light of Sourceforge's experience with the very same product.
My bet is that it will, but only because of the amount of effort or money they're putting into keeping it going.
It's possible that PostgreSQL wouldn't be able to handle acting as the backend for Slashdot, but given the experience Sourceforge has had with it, I doubt it would be much of a problem. The one thing lacking in PostgreSQL right now, replication, is the one thing they'd have to throw resources/money into. Otherwise it's more capable and faster under load than MySQL, at least if Tim Purdue's experience with Sourceforge is any indication -- so it should prove less expensive to work with in the long run.
Nobody's questioning the possibility that you can run a large, heavily-loaded site under MySQL. They're merely questioning the wisdom of doing so given the alternatives available today (there's no question that the Slashdot guys made the right choice initially).
Even so, there's a lot to be said for getting in there and actually deploying something. My experience with MySQL is that it's very limited in what it can handle, but that experience is based on the MyISAM backend, not the InnoDB one. Slashdot is using the latter, and that probably makes all the difference.
There's no way you'd get me to argue that Slashdot should switch over to PostgreSQL without a lot of testing first. Chances are, it would be more trouble than it's worth, but that's only for now. Experience shows that requirements change over time. Slashdot may eventually need exactly what PostgreSQL's got. So one can only hope that MySQL keeps up with their needs.
I'd still be very interested in how well PostgreSQL would work (compared with MySQL + InnoDB) as a Slashdot backend...
I don't get it. Does anyone but the people doing the writeups actually think MySQL is meant for large scale terabyte databases?
What do you expect? Slashdot runs on MySQL, and they've invested rather heavily in it (seeing how they funded development of InnoDB if I'm not mistaken). So of course the Slashdot crew is going to sing its praises.
It is a shame that they didn't switch over to PostgreSQL, though, if only to give that database engine a real workout. But I understand why they chose MySQL over PostgreSQL initially: back when Slashdot was first written, PostgreSQL was a buggy piece of crap.
My, how long we've come since then, now that PostgreSQL kicks the crap out of MySQL in many departments and holds its own in the rest (replication is the only exception I'm aware of).
Slashdot Mirror
People in the entire U.S., but especially the editors at Slashdot, were astounded and amazed by this announcement.
"I never even suspected" said chrisd, an editor at Slashdot.
The Dow rose 78 points today, largely in response to this announcement.
Hmm...so to write "two hundred thousand Kelvin", you'd write "200KK"? :-)
Perhaps they would. But perhaps they wouldn't. If Adobe actually didn't want them to prosecute then they would have gotten one or more members of Congress or the Senate involved, if not a number of people in the Executive branch. At that point, I think it's likely that the Feds would have found some excuse to release Dmitry.
And why would the Feds care one way about their shiny new law?
The answer, of course, is because corporations like Adobe pay them to (whether directly to the officials or indirectly through campaign contributions to the guys in charge, it's all the same).
Ah, I see. So if I want to upgrade my operating system from NT4 to Win2k (because Win2k contains bugfixes, among other things, that I require for continued operation), I don't have to pay anything?
Uh huh. That's what I thought.
Windows server license fees are non-recurring in name only. In practice, they are recurring, and that's all that matters to the bottom line.
And if you believe otherwise, then explain to us why the vast, vast majority of shops upgraded from NT 3.51, and why many of them upgraded from NT 4. You simply don't go through that kind of pain unless it's for a damned good reason.
Explain to us how to run (as an example) SQL Server 2000 (or even SQL Server 7) under NT 3.51. Oh, I can't? I see. So if I suddenly want to run a Microsoft database on my NT 3.51 server box, I have to upgrade to at least NT 4? Right. That means it's OS upgrade time, which means paying for a new OS license, even if I don't want to upgrade my OS.
Oh, one other thing. So many people (you're probably included in this list) claim that the reason for buying Microsoft is that they support their products. Pray tell, how exactly are you going to get support for NT 3.51 from them? Are they going to support it to the degree necessary to get SQL Server 2000 going on it? Didn't think so.
Product end of life is something everyone has to deal with sooner or later, so the only way software license fees won't be recurring is if the upgrades are all free. And that's just not the case with any flavor of Windows that I know of, and certainly not the case with any of their server offerings.
It's not a one-time charge. You get charged at least that amount every time you need to upgrade the box to a newer version of the OS.
How many people here never upgrade the OS on their servers, never replace their servers with newer hardware, etc.? Thought so.
Windows server license charges are recurring charges. The only thing that varies is the duration.
Still, your point that the server license fees are small compared with the maintenance fees is somewhat valid. The problem is that you're paying someone to maintain the system regardless, so the difference in acquisition cost isn't as easy to ignore as you would have us believe. And remember: the money you don't spend on server license fees is money you can spend on other things, like more hardware. Ultimately the question is which OS gives you the most value for your money, and Linux wins that one hands down most of the time.
There's just one thing I have issues with:
MS products might be 20% more likely to be infected than Linux just based on the rollout numbers, but experience repeatedly shows that MS products in the real world are infected much more often than that.
Now, that 20% difference you speak of may be limited only to exploitation of bugs, but to limit your comparison only to that is the same sort of mistake you accuse the authors of the paper of. You can't just limit yourself to exploitation of bugs, you have to include exploitation of design flaws as well, and that is where Microsoft products typically fall on their face. Whether it's automatic execution of malicious code during a document preview in the explorer (or Outlook) or an install program that doesn't make you change the sa SQL server password, Microsoft has consistently shown that basic security is something of an afterthought to it. If they're changing that, then good for them! It's about time.
But until they start actually designing their products with as much consideration of security as of useability, Linux will maintain a significant advantage over Windows in resistance to attacks.
Perhaps. It depends a great deal on how often his business sends and receives MS document files outside of the company. My observation is that most of the use of Office is for internal documents, and for that OpenOffice will work very nicely even if MS decides to go to a new document format.
OpenOffice only has to run well enough and do enough. There are probably a few things that Office will do that OpenOffice cannot, but I'd bet that those things are very esoteric. As it is, OpenOffice will do quite a lot, including things like embedding spreadsheets and other objects. The one killer app Office has is Outlook, but even that isn't irreplaceable: there's Evolution on the Linux side.
MySQL is the wrong free database to be using in your comparison because as database engines go it's not particularly capable (but it's obviously capable enough for many of the things it's used for. And as with most Free Software, it's improving over time). Try PostgreSQL instead.
Exactly. The type of business determines whether or not the freely available tools will do the job. What many of us contend is that the freely available tools are now good enough to do most jobs, and that Windows is no longer a necessity to nearly the same degree that it used to be.
Well, not necessarily. There's a difference between ease of administration and efficiency of administration. Linux walks all over Windows in the second category, but not in the first.
But admittedly, once you get a Linux box set up and operating the way you want it's more or less hands free from there thanks to all the custom automation you can build so easily out of the box.
Okay, maybe he wouldn't want one...
It sure is! As long as you have enough money and influence. It's what Adobe did to Dmitry Sklyarov, after all (yeah, they later "recanted", but only a moron could have missed the "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" between Adobe and the FBI that I strongly suspect happened).
Perhaps, but if they've been bought (very likely, methinks, if we're talking about the DMCA) by interests that don't want to see you prosecuted because your case will lead to the destruction of their pet law, then it's likely that the prosecution will "accidentally" screw up their side of things such that you end up being let off on a technicality. Pet law stays safe, but you end up a lot poorer as a result. They win.
Don't underestimate the abilities of the bad guys here. In the U.S., they're almost invincible because of the sheer amount of money and power they wield.
Well, that's what Adobe and (perhaps) the feds claim. But my bet is that Adobe passed a note to the feds under the table that said "Don't mind what we say in public. Fuck Dmitry hard".
I see little reason to believe that Adobe actually suddenly had this huge change of heart. How naive can you be to believe nonsense like that? I strongly suspect the "change of heart" about Dmitri was only at the PR level.
The light is that of an oncoming train...
You really don't get it, do you?
You won't see a switch en masse to IPv6 or any other such new technology until two things happen:
Neither of those is true for the IPv6 cutover right now, and I doubt the first one will ever really be true, thanks to NAT and VPNs.
You may see some IPv4 over IPv6 on some of the backbone, but for that to happen routing of IPv6 has to be much easier than routing of IPv4 (or IPv6 has to offer other very compelling advantages over IPv4), and I seriously doubt that's the case.
Except that there is one crucial difference here: in your example, you have to go out of your way to discriminate between blacks and whites: you have to set up a completely separate drinking fountain.
In the case of Southwest's web site, it's exactly the opposite: they would have to go out of their way to not "discriminate" by accomodating the blind person.
My view on this is almost purely practical: is it easier and faster for someone to surf a compliant web site to get at the ticket information he's interested in, or is it easier and faster for him to call their toll-free number and speak to someone directly?
And the answer is that if you're not blind, it's probably easier and faster to surf the web site and get at what you want (depends on how adept you are at operating the computer. Should we now talk about discrimination against people who can't use a computer??), but if you're blind it's easier and faster to call no matter how accomodating the web site is. And that's because visual scanning of information is orders of magnitude faster than audio or tactile scanning of that same information.
Bottom line: it doesn't matter how blind-friendly Southwest makes their web site: it'll still be harder for a blind person to use than the telephone. As long as the rates, schedules, and special offers are identical between the two, the fact that Southwest's web site isn't blind-friendly should not matter.
So no, you can't use the black-versus-white comparison and get away with it. That discrimination is foul because it is based on superficial differences that don't make any real difference. Blind versus sighted is very different, because here we are talking about a true difference in capabilities.
And if you don't believe that, then you must believe that blind people should be allowed to drive, or that they should be allowed to fly personal airplanes. That we don't allow the blind to drive a car or pilot an airplane is "discrimination" of the same kind we're talking about, right?
You have to draw the line somewhere, because there is a real difference between a blind person and a sighted one, and no amount of legal wrangling will change that basic fact. At some point, the disadvantaged (in whatever way, from being physically disabled in some way to being unable to speak or read the commonly-used language) person has to take some responsibility for dealing with his condition. To insist on anything else leads to absurdities such as requiring all businesses to hire people who can read, write and speak every human language in use on the planet today.
So: you seem to be in favor of forcing Southwest and any other business to make their site "blind-friendly". Are you also in favor of forcing them to do their site up in Cantonese? Arabic? Czech? Finnish? The only reason a blind person can view a web site at all is that he can get his hands on technology that does the translation for him. Are you going to insist that the technology involved be made available for free? Are you going to insist that everyone limit their web site designs to only those that said technology can handle? How far are you willing to go here? At what point do you draw the line? If the translators that blind people obviously use didn't exist, would you then insist that businesses not be able to put up web sites just because blind people couldn't then make use of them?
Enough of all that. The blind person can pick up the phone and get exactly the same results. It's only if he can't get the same deals that he has a legitimate gripe. Otherwise he should convince the vendor of his translator to produce something that can read Southwest's web site.
Sorry, but that'll never happen in our lifetimes.
It won't happen because the corporations that are behind the DMCA are either the owners of the mass media or have deals with the owners of the mass media to keep information about the negative side of the DMCA off the air.
When are you guys going to figure out that there is no good way to communicate with the masses except through the corporate-controlled mass media? When are you guys going to realize that this is why corporations so completely and utterly control the U.S. government today, and why elected officials today are almost to a man sock-puppets of the corporations (remember: you can't elect someone you don't know about, and someone who isn't sufficiently well-publicized will never be elected, and the mass media is the only way to get enough exposure to matter. Nice racket for the mass media corporations, huh?)?
The corporations have the U.S. locked up so completely that I think the U.S. is beyond help now.
That may be, but the problem with class action suits is that they are almost always brought in order to benefit the lawyers. It's rare indeed that the actual plaintiffs in such suits gain anything significant from them. Often the plaintiffs end up with a settlement that represents less than what they lost at the hands of the defendant. But the settlement amount is usually large enough that the lawyers representing the plaintiffs make enough to retire to a life of complete luxury.
Remember: the lawyers representing you in a class action lawsuit don't work for you: they work for themselves, and are just using you as a tool to gain for themselves insane amounts of money.
What that means in this case is that if the RIAA offers to settle early for $100 million, the lawyers will probably take the deal, because their cut will be something like 30% of that, and $30 million for a small group of lawyers is a lot of money if the amount of time it represents is small. They know that if they don't take the deal, the RIAA has the resources to drag the case out for decades if need be, so they'll take the deal. And the RIAA is thus still ahead a cool $300 million.
If there's another boot to fall, it'll be something other than a class action lawsuit. And if you want an idea of the likely long-term outcome, just look at the tobacco companies and how much they were "hurt" in the end (hint: not much) by the class action lawsuits.
This can be done for Gnome in your $HOME/.gnomerc file, which is just a shell script (I have mine source my .profile so that I can make environment changes in one place).
Works in Debian, at least.
What's likely to happen then? Do you guys really think the copyright cartel will take that sitting down?
I think what will happen is that the copyright cartel will bribe Congress into passing another CTEA with an even longer extension (enough to make up the difference in time between the last CTEA and now, at the very least). And then that will go through the legal process and eventually be struck down. And then Congress passes another one.
And another one.
And another one.
Until eventually the SC does not strike it down.
But any way you look at it, if Congress has enough incentive, they can keep passing the same law(s) that the SC keeps striking down, and those laws will have force until they reach the SC.
So what, exactly, prevents Congress from doing what I describe above?
This is true: it makes them a good choice for building a silent PC.
You can do the same thing with a P4 as well, since it'll automatically underclock itself to keep itself from overheating. You'll typically get about half the rated speed (based on my tests with a 1.5GHz CPU) from a P4 when it's got the heatsink on but the fan off.
But the P4 is quite a bit more expensive...
Do you really think you'd ever see the U.S. government today stepping in and telling two parties in a patent fight that it would not be enforcing any of the patents in question? Not in your lifetime!
The problems we face today are much worse than those in the past, because the bad guys today have a worldwide presence and many times the amount of money and power that they had back in the day.
That's not to say that the problems today are new: they're not. The Roman Empire went through the same thing. The difference is that the Roman Empire had enemies on the outside to topple them, whereas a worldwide police state (which is what we're headed for) wouldn't. Oh, and back in Roman times a group of 100 trained soldiers had perhaps a factor of three or four advantage over a group of 100 civilians, whereas today a group of 100 trained soldiers with modern weapons has more like a factor of a thousand (or a million if you include nukes) advantage. Point being that any civilian uprising in modern times is going to be squashed unless it gets military support.
The American Revolution simply couldn't happen today.
So things are different today.
True for users. But I thought he was talking strictly about developers. Most developers do want to know the details. They have to know the details, in fact, since that's what makes it possible for them to get the job done.
And this is exactly why the Moon will probably be the destination for a permanent settlement and Mars will not. Do you really think any earthbound government is going to be stupid enough to allow the formation of an independent colony of people, especially in space (where they would be in a position to throw big rocks at the earth -- not something that could necessarily be done by humans on Mars, but certainly something that could be done by inhabitants of the asteroid belt)?
Governments are interested in control more than anything else. A colony on the Moon would be much easier to control than one on Mars, if only because the government on Earth could threaten to cut off the flow of mandatory supplies to the Moon colony if necessary.
But that's not gracefully degrading failovers of the database, but of page generation. Since it's the database backend we're talking about, failures of that backend count, no matter how such failures are handled by the client code.
I will certainly be the first to admit that MySQL is powerful enough to host Slashdot -- for now. Only time will tell whether that will remain the case. As I said, I suspect it will, if only because of the determination on the part of the Slashdot team to force it to do the job no matter how well or badly suited it may be (because switching to a different database backend probably represents more work in the short term than simply keeping MySQL afloat does).
Then why is it that at least once a month I end up getting the static page instead of the (MySQL-backended) dynamically generated one?
It is obviously possible to use MySQL to backend a site such as Slashdot, since they're clearly doing it, but that doesn't mean that MySQL is better suited to the task than any of the alternatives (free or otherwise). You can compensate for a lot of software deficiencies with sufficient sweat and a bit of hardware. I know, I've done it.
And despite Slashdot's success with MySQL, Sourceforge (owned by the very same people that own Slashdot, even!) was essentially forced to convert to PostgreSQL due to the limitations of this very same engine that Slashdot successfully uses.
The real question isn't whether or not MySQL can function adequately for Slashdot right now. It clearly can, with sufficient effort (and don't mistake me: other, more powerful database engines would require effort, too, but I suspect it wouldn't be quite as much). The real question is whether or not MySQL will continue to function adequately for Slashdot in light of Sourceforge's experience with the very same product.
My bet is that it will, but only because of the amount of effort or money they're putting into keeping it going.
It's possible that PostgreSQL wouldn't be able to handle acting as the backend for Slashdot, but given the experience Sourceforge has had with it, I doubt it would be much of a problem. The one thing lacking in PostgreSQL right now, replication, is the one thing they'd have to throw resources/money into. Otherwise it's more capable and faster under load than MySQL, at least if Tim Purdue's experience with Sourceforge is any indication -- so it should prove less expensive to work with in the long run.
Nobody's questioning the possibility that you can run a large, heavily-loaded site under MySQL. They're merely questioning the wisdom of doing so given the alternatives available today (there's no question that the Slashdot guys made the right choice initially).
Even so, there's a lot to be said for getting in there and actually deploying something. My experience with MySQL is that it's very limited in what it can handle, but that experience is based on the MyISAM backend, not the InnoDB one. Slashdot is using the latter, and that probably makes all the difference.
There's no way you'd get me to argue that Slashdot should switch over to PostgreSQL without a lot of testing first. Chances are, it would be more trouble than it's worth, but that's only for now. Experience shows that requirements change over time. Slashdot may eventually need exactly what PostgreSQL's got. So one can only hope that MySQL keeps up with their needs.
I'd still be very interested in how well PostgreSQL would work (compared with MySQL + InnoDB) as a Slashdot backend...
What do you expect? Slashdot runs on MySQL, and they've invested rather heavily in it (seeing how they funded development of InnoDB if I'm not mistaken). So of course the Slashdot crew is going to sing its praises.
It is a shame that they didn't switch over to PostgreSQL, though, if only to give that database engine a real workout. But I understand why they chose MySQL over PostgreSQL initially: back when Slashdot was first written, PostgreSQL was a buggy piece of crap.
My, how long we've come since then, now that PostgreSQL kicks the crap out of MySQL in many departments and holds its own in the rest (replication is the only exception I'm aware of).