What's your position on the chasm that's developed between the "Free Software" and "Open Source" camps? Is there a genuine reason for having two seperate movements? Lastly, is there any hope of consolation between these two movements...are they even on the same track??
I know these are tough questions to ask.. but the good ones are always controversial.
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince realizes the futility of a career entirely based on "1999", goes insane, burns down World Trade Center in Minneapolis, gets bodyslammed by Gov. Ventura
HEY! I live up here! And I can tell you right now Ventura isn't going to body slam the Artist for writing '1999'. I will.
It's a sound idea - but I've found that most slashdotters don't like to have their beliefs raked over the coals. And to be honest - nobody does. I just had this gut feeling that as soon as a moderator saw that, he was going to -1 me. I was hoping he would glance at my article before it got zero'd, and remember that the moderation system was designed to promote good comments... even if the moderator disagrees with them.
I wasn't begging... I was just asking them to be sure why they were marking me down before they did. And was it really necessary to -1 my request for the moderator(s) to pause for a few seconds before commiting the changes? Stuff like this doesn't have it's own forum to be discussed in...
My opinion? He should have rejected it out of hand out of hand. Universities aren't the exclusive purveyors of knowledge - there's alot of people out there that don't have a degree and are alot more intelligent than those who do. Linus is consenting to let them continue the facade that you "need a degree to do anything useful". That's complete bunk - and the [ free software | open source ] movement was a slap in the face to conventional learning.
I'd like to see, for once, highly technical jobs that judged you on the basis of your skills instead of "I'm an MSCE", or "I have a BA in *blah*".
Nintendo's legal woes will never end. This week Mario sued over unsafe working conditions this week, citing having to work in lava pits, falling down pipes, eating "powerup mushrooms", and dodging fireballs. Mario is also seeking legal compensation after his brother, Luigi, was eaten by a giant fish on level 3.
*cough* Well, I heard Mario and his family were in a detox center after they ate some of the "powerup" mushrooms. 'course word has it they're gonna sue Kooba for that as soon as they recover.
Hey, I'm gonna sue Rob for making slashdot! I spend hours and hours hitting reload.. it's costing me friends. My dog left me! The milkman won't come near my house anymore.. the phone company is trying to get an injunction against me... and my employer is upset that I've missed four deadlines.
Mark my words, Malda... I'm gonna make you pay for this! *g*
Seems silly? No more so than a bunch of parents suing because their kids are "addicted" to a game. Yeesh. These parents need to take responsibility - if they think there kids are addicted.. maybe they should enroll them in a Pokeamon 12 Step Program. "Hi, my name is fubar, and I'm a pokeaholic"...
Since NASA is probably going to dissipate into nothing more than a place to launch commercial satellites instead of doing scientific research, it's likely they're looking for somebody to pass the torch of scientific exploration on to.
Congress has done nothing but hinder this country's space exploration.. and shame on them for that. This may simply be a move of desperation - they know that there's little chance of doing anything important left. The Apollo program is long dead, the Mars missions are tapering off.. and MIR is going to be crashing back to earth soon. What's left?
Umm, not to burst anybody's bubble.. but decentralized computing has been the paradigm for IT for a long time - put your web server on one box, your DNS on another, your mail server on a third (Multiply the number by 4 if you are running NT...), etc.
Clustering isn't ground-breaking technology.. it's been around for a long time. Now, the concept of parallel processing has been around for a long time too... and it doesn't seem like many manufacturers are rushing to get their products working on beowulf clusters.
This isn't to say it isn't a great idea - it's just that there isn't any support for it. There's plenty of alternatives too. For example:
Webservers: Set up several servers, and an SQL backend (or an NFS mounted partition) to hold the content. For added speed, throw squid over that setup. You can even tell remote caches to access your servers round-robin style by putting in multiple 'A' records.
DNS/mail: Heh. Even the IETF got this one right by suggesting primary and secondary DNS.
Filesharing: There is some work being done to create a 'real' beowulf cluster to create something of a decentralized logical file server. For now, use AFS or CODA.. which have all kinds of cool performance benefits. As an aside - both are a helluva lot more stable than the Nightmare File System (NFS).
Printing: They have affordable net appliances to do this (HP print server anyone?), and even some printers support direct access. Failing that, setting up multiple servers for multiple printers works pretty well - This is decentralized by design anyway...
So there you have it... all the staples of the corporate network - "clusterized". New technology? I don't think so. All the examples I gave you are in wide use (and have been for some time!).
8:1 odds on having atleast one of those boxes rooted within the next hour.
Seriously - I hope they firewalled those boxes so they can't be used as springboards to attack other sites. This could quickly turn into a publicity-stunt-gone-bad.
Just FYI - you don't need to give them your real SSN. I never give my SSN out to anybody besides my bank,my employer(s), and the IRS. Anybody else who wants it can take an H2SO4 enema you-know-where.
It may not be legal, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sacrifice my privacy because a bunch of neanderthals can't figure out a better way to track me. I like to be able to choose anonymity. I avoid and detest any organization that attempts to impede my right to anonymity.
The internet will eventually be taxed, barring a constitutional amendment to stop it. The reasons are simple - if all commerce occurs online, then where will state governments get their funding from? We need taxes to support things like the highway system, public transportation, and public education. The state governments get the majority of their funding from property and sales taxes! You can't simply destroy one source of revenue without creating another.
So fine, don't tax the internet. What will you trade for that priveledge? There is no easy money to be made - you gotta pay the piper. It's just a question of who, and how much.
... It's the responsibility of the Operating System to ensure security. blah blah blah.. It is obvious that linux does not have Enterprise-level reliability. blah blah blah... blah blah.. IIS is better than Apache... blah blah... The problem here is that the user doesn't have access to a GUI, and thus can't see problems like this... blah blah blah... Of course Microsoft would have released a service pack by now - what does the Linux offer? A cryptic "patch" option. They should have an easy-to-upgrade "click here to compromise your security" feature like NT does... blah blah blah...tune in next week for 'Why I'm so cool, and you're so not.'
Sounds like Microsoft got a good kick in their complacency courtesy of Linux. The trial really shook things up in the industry.. and there's now evidence emerging that M$ is rapidly losing ground.
This is a subtle move by Microsoft to move itself in a position to take advantage of the "alternative OS" marketplace should it's primary source of revenue collapse. They may sell bad software, but they're not stupid - they know the marketplace inside out. Am I suprised? No. But I'm still not going to buy "winux 2005".
I'd agree. They're a big decentralized company. I know of a few people in new england that have nothing but nice things to say about their service. Obviously QoS varies widely across the board. Up here in minnesota however, service is very poor. In any event.. like I said - caveat emptor.
wonder if the slowness has anything to do with people running web servers off their cable modems like I see you are doing?
Did you read the spec sheet when you got your cablemodem? Webservers and warez users aren't the issue. They have ~1024 dialup IP addresses that they serve to the Minnesota area. According to the spec sheet for the SB1200 one-way, the downspeed link has a maximum speed of 25.08 mbps (after FEC) - see page 1-4 of your SB1200 manual. You do the math.
Also just last weekend the cable was on and off for about 3 days. It is certainly more reliable than my previous dialup accounts though. Besides those two outages I have no other real complaints.
Well, like I said.. I have the raw data here for you to go over, as well as the actual programs I run to collect them. I'd be happy to let you inspect everything and arrive at your own conclusion. I will tell you right now though that in the Roseville area outages occur approximately once per week and last up to 2 hours. Usually the connection is "intermittent" during this time.
I should have included this in my other post.. but something worth mentioning is that Mediaone is very much anti-linux - I had a technician inform me that management takes a very strong stance against running "unsupported" systems out here. He even said that he has heard of people being fined for running linux.
For the record (and possibly losing my access over this..), I would like everybody to know that I have run Linux on the mediaone network since last September. I have only had one problem since then - and that was due to buggy firmware on the modem. If anybody has problems with their cablemodem displaying high-ascii garbage in the text fields.. Click on this link, which will reset your SB1200 cablemodem to factory defaults. Simply removing the garbage and re-entering the data will not fix it.
Well, I can't speak for everybody's experiences with Mediaone.. but mine have been unsatisfactory to say the least. During prime time you get less than 3k/s thoroughput, and latency is a joke (I routinely see latencies above 400ms after 18:00), and short service outages during the off-peak hours (usually 9:00 - 14:00) are alittle too common.
I have a graph up online that'll show you what I mean. If you have any questions, e-mail me and I can give you the raw data, and some other statistics. I live up in Minnesota.. and some of my friends have also expressed dissapointment in the QoS that mediaone offers up here. I'm paying $40/mo to get substandard service during prime time - my plain old analog modem (USR 56k) to a conventional ISP is actually better after about 18:00.
I've been wanting to put together a report for the Public Utilities Commissioner (PUC) for awhile, but after contacting their office they didn't even seem to understand what I was complaining about.:( I'm out of options up here for high speed access - xDSL is available in my area (US West - keep up the good work - nothing but rave reviews) but I'm too far away to get it.
Mediaone - are you listening? How about giving us some guaranteed QoS, or giving us more on-the-wire bandwidth?
Actually, the GPL does allow commercial development. You can even keep the changes to yourself. But if you give your changes to anybody else.. you can't stop them from.. say, uploading it to freshmeat, or selling it, or really anything. That's my read of it, anyway.
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Did RMS really sing 'join us now and share the software'? :^)
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I know these are tough questions to ask.. but the good ones are always controversial.
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HEY! I live up here! And I can tell you right now Ventura isn't going to body slam the Artist for writing '1999'. I will.
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I wasn't begging... I was just asking them to be sure why they were marking me down before they did. And was it really necessary to -1 my request for the moderator(s) to pause for a few seconds before commiting the changes? Stuff like this doesn't have it's own forum to be discussed in...
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I'd like to see, for once, highly technical jobs that judged you on the basis of your skills instead of "I'm an MSCE", or "I have a BA in *blah*".
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Nintendo's legal woes will never end. This week Mario sued over unsafe working conditions this week, citing having to work in lava pits, falling down pipes, eating "powerup mushrooms", and dodging fireballs. Mario is also seeking legal compensation after his brother, Luigi, was eaten by a giant fish on level 3.
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*cough* Well, I heard Mario and his family were in a detox center after they ate some of the "powerup" mushrooms. 'course word has it they're gonna sue Kooba for that as soon as they recover.
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Mark my words, Malda... I'm gonna make you pay for this! *g*
Seems silly? No more so than a bunch of parents suing because their kids are "addicted" to a game. Yeesh. These parents need to take responsibility - if they think there kids are addicted.. maybe they should enroll them in a Pokeamon 12 Step Program. "Hi, my name is fubar, and I'm a pokeaholic"...
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Congress has done nothing but hinder this country's space exploration.. and shame on them for that. This may simply be a move of desperation - they know that there's little chance of doing anything important left. The Apollo program is long dead, the Mars missions are tapering off.. and MIR is going to be crashing back to earth soon. What's left?
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Clustering isn't ground-breaking technology.. it's been around for a long time. Now, the concept of parallel processing has been around for a long time too... and it doesn't seem like many manufacturers are rushing to get their products working on beowulf clusters.
This isn't to say it isn't a great idea - it's just that there isn't any support for it. There's plenty of alternatives too. For example:
Webservers: Set up several servers, and an SQL backend (or an NFS mounted partition) to hold the content. For added speed, throw squid over that setup. You can even tell remote caches to access your servers round-robin style by putting in multiple 'A' records.
DNS/mail: Heh. Even the IETF got this one right by suggesting primary and secondary DNS.
Filesharing: There is some work being done to create a 'real' beowulf cluster to create something of a decentralized logical file server. For now, use AFS or CODA.. which have all kinds of cool performance benefits. As an aside - both are a helluva lot more stable than the Nightmare File System (NFS).
Printing: They have affordable net appliances to do this (HP print server anyone?), and even some printers support direct access. Failing that, setting up multiple servers for multiple printers works pretty well - This is decentralized by design anyway...
So there you have it... all the staples of the corporate network - "clusterized". New technology? I don't think so. All the examples I gave you are in wide use (and have been for some time!).
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Seriously - I hope they firewalled those boxes so they can't be used as springboards to attack other sites. This could quickly turn into a publicity-stunt-gone-bad.
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It may not be legal, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sacrifice my privacy because a bunch of neanderthals can't figure out a better way to track me. I like to be able to choose anonymity. I avoid and detest any organization that attempts to impede my right to anonymity.
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So fine, don't tax the internet. What will you trade for that priveledge? There is no easy money to be made - you gotta pay the piper. It's just a question of who, and how much.
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Man, that is just too funny. :^) And so true. If I had moderator access right now, I'd +5 you.
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... of course having an OS with holes big enough to drive a bus through doesn't help matters.
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... It's the responsibility of the Operating System to ensure security. blah blah blah.. It is obvious that linux does not have Enterprise-level reliability. blah blah blah... blah blah.. IIS is better than Apache... blah blah... The problem here is that the user doesn't have access to a GUI, and thus can't see problems like this... blah blah blah... Of course Microsoft would have released a service pack by now - what does the Linux offer? A cryptic "patch" option. They should have an easy-to-upgrade "click here to compromise your security" feature like NT does... blah blah blah...tune in next week for 'Why I'm so cool, and you're so not.'
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This is a subtle move by Microsoft to move itself in a position to take advantage of the "alternative OS" marketplace should it's primary source of revenue collapse. They may sell bad software, but they're not stupid - they know the marketplace inside out. Am I suprised? No. But I'm still not going to buy "winux 2005".
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I'd agree. They're a big decentralized company. I know of a few people in new england that have nothing but nice things to say about their service. Obviously QoS varies widely across the board. Up here in minnesota however, service is very poor. In any event.. like I said - caveat emptor.
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Did you read the spec sheet when you got your cablemodem? Webservers and warez users aren't the issue. They have ~1024 dialup IP addresses that they serve to the Minnesota area. According to the spec sheet for the SB1200 one-way, the downspeed link has a maximum speed of 25.08 mbps (after FEC) - see page 1-4 of your SB1200 manual. You do the math.
Also just last weekend the cable was on and off for about 3 days. It is certainly more reliable than my previous dialup accounts though. Besides those two outages I have no other real complaints.
Well, like I said.. I have the raw data here for you to go over, as well as the actual programs I run to collect them. I'd be happy to let you inspect everything and arrive at your own conclusion. I will tell you right now though that in the Roseville area outages occur approximately once per week and last up to 2 hours. Usually the connection is "intermittent" during this time.
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For the record (and possibly losing my access over this..), I would like everybody to know that I have run Linux on the mediaone network since last September. I have only had one problem since then - and that was due to buggy firmware on the modem. If anybody has problems with their cablemodem displaying high-ascii garbage in the text fields.. Click on this link, which will reset your SB1200 cablemodem to factory defaults. Simply removing the garbage and re-entering the data will not fix it.
Caveat emptor people...
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I have a graph up online that'll show you what I mean. If you have any questions, e-mail me and I can give you the raw data, and some other statistics. I live up in Minnesota.. and some of my friends have also expressed dissapointment in the QoS that mediaone offers up here. I'm paying $40/mo to get substandard service during prime time - my plain old analog modem (USR 56k) to a conventional ISP is actually better after about 18:00.
I've been wanting to put together a report for the Public Utilities Commissioner (PUC) for awhile, but after contacting their office they didn't even seem to understand what I was complaining about. :( I'm out of options up here for high speed access - xDSL is available in my area (US West - keep up the good work - nothing but rave reviews) but I'm too far away to get it.
Mediaone - are you listening? How about giving us some guaranteed QoS, or giving us more on-the-wire bandwidth?
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Alright. Well, thanks for clarifying the matter. Boy do I feel stupid now.... :)
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*cough* We were discussing what the GPL allows.. not the QPL. Take your own advice and look before you leap (or post). Yeesh...
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Actually, the GPL does allow commercial development. You can even keep the changes to yourself. But if you give your changes to anybody else.. you can't stop them from.. say, uploading it to freshmeat, or selling it, or really anything. That's my read of it, anyway.
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... So then would I be correct in assuming that there are no outstanding issues with using the CGI version of php* ?
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