Sorry, I know I misread it at first glance, but it really does fit. They want to know everything you're watching and listening to, and it's pay-per-view.
Sure, a 2-story or 3-story apartment building in Earthquake Country is going to be built out of wood-frame. That doesn't mean it isn't insulated well; you can do just fine with proper spacing, good sheetrock, and insulation if you want to. Shoddy construction is usually an artifact of housing booms, when lots of people are moving into an area and the contest is to get as many units built quickly as you can. (Ok, yes, that's most of Silicon Valley:-) I've lived in apartments in New Jersey that were just as shoddy, and I now live in a mid-1970s condo in Mountain View where I never hear my side neighbors through the walls, and my downstairs neighbor almost never hears me (though he hears my washing machine, and sometimes hears my cats racing each other.)
On the other hand, you won't find many 10-story wood-frame buildings *anywhere*. Building them in earthquake country means using steel beams and rebar, and reinforced-concrete floors are often built on metal decking. That doesn't mean that room-dividing walls are built of decently sound-proof material, but they can be - my mother-in-law's place in LA seems to have cinderblocks for most of the dividing walls, though that may be engineering conservatism (the rest of the construction was nothing special...)
But then, most of the dorms where I went to college were cinderblock, and that didn't mean that you couldn't hear the guy on the first floor with the big stereo, even in the dead of winter.
*My* VAX 11/780 had four RM05 drives - each cost about $35K, size of a washing machine, and they used 250MB removable disk packs. (Yes, I'm sure some of you older folks had the RP06s...) The machine was used for classified government work at some point, so when the sysadmin after me disposed of the disk packs, she had them sandblasted first. But the drives themselves were probably sold to somebody. (It was probably about 1990?) By then, we'd upgraded the 780 to a 785, and installed an 8600 next to it, which was still too slow.
Today, of course, 100GB costs less than the monthly electric bill for the 3-phase power our VAX used.
Also in the early 90s, I helped ESR dispose of a bunch of 9-track tapes he'd been unable to give away at the Trenton Computer Faire. He decided to do the Buddhist thing and not be attached to his possessions, so we Frisbee'd the things into a dumpster. That was probably the same year that I bought the Sun-2 that's sitting in my attic, still unused because I couldn't find the diskless SunOS 3.5 for a Sun-2, only Sun-3 versions:-)
If they've got a T1 line, and are doing simple clean static web non-SSL pages, a Pentium 60 ought to be just fine, and a Mini-ITX is way overkill. Shouldn't be any trouble to keep a 10 Mbps Ethernet full, though I'd recommend doing some benchmarks (on almost any platform) before trying to fill a T3 with it.
The places you get into trouble are where you're doing fancy dynamic web pages (usually not too much of a problem), or using SSL for all your pages (easy to burn CPU that way) or cranking more disk access than a single IDE drive can handle (not the problem here), or maybe doing aggressive database applications with it.
The term "Myth" implies a literary structure, as well as often being a comment about whether you believe in something. While literature doesn't have the same level of precision in its language as programming, the terms really do have meaning, and if you want to convey information it's worth using them correctly. Greek stories about Zeus the God are myths; Greek stories about Socrates the philosopher or Pericles the politician or Thucydides and Herodotus the historians of the Pelopennesian Wars are history (though the quality of those histories is variable); Aristophanes's play "The Frogs" is entertainment drawing on mythological sources mixed with contemporary political commentary. Homer - well, you can argue how much of that was meant to be myth as opposed to entertainment fiction.
Referring to the earlier parts of Genesis as "myth" is appropriate - stories about how the creation happened, where man came from and how we got into this sorry position we find ourselves in, etc. Many of us believe these stories to be true, in various ways, but they're not the same kinds of literature that history is. (They're also not the books that Via is naming chips after - "Genesis" would be the Intel 4004...)
Many of the books are historical, particularly the ones these chips were named after. They're not structured as myth, and they're not teaching moral lessons or philosophical in the ways that myths do, though you can often learn those things from them. So-and-so was the king, and his sons were Joe and Fred, and they went out and invaded this territory and killed the people there and attacked that city and got killed, and his brother took over and was an even worse king and then the Babylonians invaded... Most of that's unarguably objective, though there are bits of commentary about how God helped the Israelites the times they won, and how the kings who lost lost because they were idol-worshippers and God was judging them. But even if you don't believe that God spoke to the priests, there's usually no reason to believe that the priests didn't speak to the politicians; it certainly happens today.
The Psalms aren't myth or history - they're devotional poetry. They're really much more about the emotional life of the various authors.
The Proverbs aren't myths - they're moral teachings.
The various books of the Prophets are mostly not mythology either - most of them have some combination of history (who the prophet was and what was going on around him and what king he told off, since that was usually what prophets did) and mystical literature (what the prophet saw), though some of the events like Daniel in the Lions' Den can be discussed as mythical.
Also, terms like "Christianity" and "Judaism" have meaning, and while Christians believe in the Biblical books used by the Jews, they're Jewish books, and we're the latecomers here.
Too much of the GRUB documentation is about how it can act like a shell that you negotiate with, rather than just editing a file. You've answered what I needed to know - thanks!
The cable industry has been suicidally clueless on the issue of home cable users running servers since almost the beginning. The problem is the perception of bad service, which was partly caused by some bad equipment in their beta-test city (performance really sucks if you've got 10% packet loss), but the PacBell "Don't be a Cable Web Hog, buy DSL Instead" TV commercials really hurt them. Cable bandwidth is very asymmetric, and the early equipment didn't have the capability to throttle upstream very effectively, so it was easy for a few big uploaders to dog out their neighborhood's upstream, and therefore trash downstream performance as well. Now all of the equipment tends to throttle upstreams to 128kbps or 256kbps instead of 768, and packet-shapers are cheap and effective enough to do fair queuing on the upstreams.
The biggest problems the cable modem companies had, beyond their initial technical learning and of course the supply of capital, were how to get subscribers to buy the stuff. The way to do that is to have really cool applications that need broadband, and the way to get them is NOT for cablecos to think them up and offer them in walled gardens, it's to make the tools available for then net to invent and discover them (either by users or by commercial companies - it doesn't matter to them.) Anything they do which makes that not happen is seriously detrimental to their success, and the fact that they squashed server development during the Internet Boom means they lost the chance to have VCs funding it. On the other hand, a few more years of Moore's Law have increased disk space and processor capability on home machines and game consoles, and decreased the costs of hardware widgets (e.g. little firewall appliances), so that may get them some development that didn't happen in 1990.
Most cable companies had three opinions about Napster - the official ones were "Servers - BAD!" and "Copyright violaters - BAD! BAD!", and the unofficial opinions were "Well, Duhh, why do you think people buy cable modems, it's so they can download music." The current equivalent problem is Wifi - they really really need to find a way to visualize open Wifi networks as an opportunity to get more customers, rather than a bunch of evil bandwidth-sharing service thieves. Perhaps a tunneled gateway service that would let them charge $5/month for WiFi access to anybody who's already a cable subscriber and $20/month to anybody who's not?
He's made a couple of trollish comments on this topic. It's obviously not abetting a crime to host a torrent for something you're allowed to copy freely, so things like Linux ISOs and Jam Band Concert Tapes are just fine.
A "90% upstream max" client would help
on
BitTorrent Guide
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Bram spent quite a while figuring out which things need tweaking to get the performance to optimize. Some of them are more critical than others, such as the "no leeching" approach. There are two basic difficulties with it, one of which might be easily fixable:
Using *all* your upstream for uploads can dog out the rest of your applications. It's nicer to be able to limit the uploading to 90% of your upstream so that ACKs for other things get through. That's probably fixable; I don't know if Bram's working on it.
ADSL and Cable Modem are asymmetric, and no-leeching limits you to your upstream rate, not your downstream, which is probably the *real* reason people tweak it. From an overall system perspective, it probably works almost as well if you balance the N:1 asymmetry by keeping the uploading going for N times as long as the download took, but it's hard to do that well, and of course kiddie leechers aren't going to think of that.
You're mistaking the term "Peer-to-Peer", which describes *how* the program works, for "things people use early popular Peer-to-Peer-based tools for" and also because you're confusing "how you let other people have your files" with "how you find files other people have." BitTorrent is Peer-to-Peer, because the way it distributes files is primarily by sharing them between peers, a piece at a time, rather than by getting them all from the host or whatever. Unlike some of the other P2P systems out there, BitTorrent doesn't have a central index of files that are available - it does its indexing on the pieces of a single file, and the person who runs the tracker for a file is usually the person who has the complete copy they're distributing.
Napster, the obvious first example of P2P file sharing, maintained a centralized index of everything it knew about, which was one reason it could be sued to death, so most of the newer file-sharing applications found ways to also decentralize their indexing (which is harder.) BitTorrent avoids the whole problem - the person running the tracker is the person publishing the file, and the indexes of who has what pieces are transitory. So if the distribution is legitimate, fine, and if it's not, the copyright owner can go sue the publisher who ripped them off.
So from an applications standpoint, yes, the person distributing a file can sometimes use it like Akamai or AT&T or Speedera to ship their stuff out faster, except that it's quasi-free because it's using the downloaders' bandwidths instead of a big caching service's bandwidth. But one big difference is that BitTorrent is designed to handle big files, while the caching services can handle anything - so they're useful for keeping your front page from being slashdotted (or superbowl-commercialed), and for the graphics on your front page, as well as for distributing the new release of your music CD or your software update. The caching services also provide a function that BT doesn't, which is accelerating delivery of small files by delivering them from nearby servers - instead of hauling them 50ms across the continent or 200ms across the Pacific, you're grabbing them from nearby, while BT requires an index hit from the tracker before fetching content. BT scales very closely with demand volume because it is P2P, so the more demand there is, the more servers there are to fill it - the caching services scale because they've got big honking servers spread around the net.
People were calling GPL the GNU Public Virus for a long time before Microsoft used the term viral for it. Not only are there people who rabidly dislike it, but most people who try to mix GPL code with their own code find it difficult not to at least have their own source disclosed in the process, if not necessarily making it also propagate GPLness.
LGPL, the FSF's Library GPL is designed to fix this problem. You can distribute GPL-ish free code, and people can use it (and agree to distribute its source code, and letting people modify it) without it infecting the rest of their code. Stallman's taken to calling it the "Lesser GPL" becaue it's less radical than he is... It's also useful for adding Free Software to existing systems that have other licenses, whether they're Berkeley-type or binary-only hardware drivers or whatever.
According to both articles, the two sysadmins reported the files to their supervisor, who reported it to the police. Sounds like they followed policy. The only uncertainty about that that I see in the article is that one of the sysadmins reported it to the other before they went to the supervisor, but depending on the work environment that's a pretty typical thing to expect.
The company's article says that there are other things going on, which they can't talk about because there's a lawsuit pending. If that's not true, and they're really doing it because they're embarassed about it being reported to the police, then they should presumably have also fired the supervisor who reported it. Sounds like there are multiple sets of ugliness and stupidity going on here...
You've been away from Windows too long (or pleasantly long enough, depending on your viewpoint:-)
The standard Windows file manager in recent Windows versions will show you little icons for files indicating what type they are, but you can also set it to show thumbnails of pictures, or big icons, or other kinds of views. And you can customize the view on a per-directory basis, so you can look at your source code directories as a list of filenames, and your My Pictures directory as thumbnails.
So this wasn't someone who'd right-click-saved thumbnails of pictures and not the full-sized pictures, this was the Windows file browser showing thumbnails of whatever-sized pictures had been saved.
Parallel Use with Other Distros ?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
How well does Gentoo work on the same system with other distros? I'd like to try it in its own partition to see if I like it, but I don't want to mess with the partitioning scheme, and my system is running GRUB because Mandrake wanted that - is it easy to add a Gentoo along with that? (It's easy with LILO, but I confess I haven't spent enough time messing with GRUB to be comfortable with it.) And of course it *can't* mess with any of the Windoze partitions, because they've got my tax software and backups of my work system.
Lots of technical people have the opposite problem - they're not working 6am-2:30pm, they're working 11-9, and getting criticized for slacking by the kinds of people who think arriving before 8am and leaving by 5:02pm is the way to work hard and don't know or care how late you're working because they've stopped thinking about work by 5:01pm. Sometimes you get their attention about this by sending them email at 8pm, though it can be more effective with some of them to leave voicemails (if your voicemail system gives timestamps, which most seem to.)
This is especially a problem for programmer-types who need to get uninterrupted concentration, and can't do that in the daytime because they have cubicles rather than offices.
I tend to check my email before going to sleep, and one of my coworkers in Boston often gets started early in the morning - we've had email conversations at 2am on occasion.
Rob Pike introduced a speech on his 8.5 windowing system for Plan 9 by saying "Ken Thompson and I spent 10 years learning what things windowing systems shouldn't do and wrote one that doesn't do them." He typed 8 1/2 (in Unicode:-) into the terminal he was using and the windowing system was booted and running in about the same amount of time you'd expect it to take to get a $ prompt back. (This was running on a Gnot, which was using NextStation hardware, grayscale screen, and I think about 4MIPS worth of 680x0.) The Acme GUI on top of it was lean and mean, but really fast and while it was tuned for a programming environment, it really could run graphical-type programs as well as text with boxes around it. I forget if the size of the code was 64KB of C or 64K lines. Either way, it was much much smaller than X.
Sure, drivers are a big deal, but window managers also make a big difference. Blackbox or pick-your-favorite-flavor-of TWM are a lot faster than something like Enlightenment or whatever Gnome is defaulting to these days.
NeWS was Sun's Network Extensible Windowing System, written in large part by James Gosling, who later went on to write Java. It was a Postscript-based windows system, so what you saw was really what you got when you printed things, and characters could be any size you wanted, and you could download programs to the display server so that work could happen at whichever end of the wire made the most sense, and mouse tracking worked really well because it ran on the server instead of the client. That's not a big issue if you're running clients and servers both on your desktop, but it matters a lot more when you're operating remotely across a slow network. Of course, being Postscript meant that debugging was a Black Art, and security was a serious risk, and the things could explode into a mess of pretty colors if you weren't careful, but it was still really really cool. And it could be stripped down to run on a Sun3, and was ported to the Mac, back when Macs had real 680x0s in them. It was happier on machines that had at least 8MB of RAM on them, but you could get away with a bit less.
NeXT also did some Display Postscript things that weren't as cool as NeWS, but still were good display environments.
A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR (Howto, Screenshot), which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow) or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.
If it's a Window System named something very similar to Athena, it ought to offer Athena Widgets, or at least have a "Simple Ugly Widgets for Slow CPUs" Theme and a FAQ reference to MIT Project Athena.
The site is heavily Slashdotted and the Google caches of it have gone wonky since I started reading it so perhaps there's something there. On the other hand, I saw information about how to be a developer using the system, and nothing about what applications had actually been developed for it. (Similarly, for PicoGUI, I saw downloads for about 10 cool themes, and 0 applications that use it...)
Yup. You may already see the page fast enough, but that's *using* pagerank - Calculating pagerank is a separate process, and if they can do it five times faster, they can either spend less money calculating it, or calculate it more frequently so it stays more current.
The usual way to handle large numbers of plaintiffs in a lawsuit is to do a class action thing; this would be easy if you had all the names, but of course the obvious way to contact them would be.... spamming them:-)
It may be a bit tacky if they put all the potentially brandable products in blue-screen blue so they can insert whatever brand pays them for product placements.
On the other hand, Repo Man did a nice spoof of this trend by using white-packaged "Generic Whatever" for most of the obvious consumbles in the film.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I know I misread it at first glance, but it really does fit. They want to know everything you're watching and listening to, and it's pay-per-view.
You ought to be able to buy a better government than that....
On the other hand, you won't find many 10-story wood-frame buildings *anywhere*. Building them in earthquake country means using steel beams and rebar, and reinforced-concrete floors are often built on metal decking. That doesn't mean that room-dividing walls are built of decently sound-proof material, but they can be - my mother-in-law's place in LA seems to have cinderblocks for most of the dividing walls, though that may be engineering conservatism (the rest of the construction was nothing special...)
But then, most of the dorms where I went to college were cinderblock, and that didn't mean that you couldn't hear the guy on the first floor with the big stereo, even in the dead of winter.
Today, of course, 100GB costs less than the monthly electric bill for the 3-phase power our VAX used.
Also in the early 90s, I helped ESR dispose of a bunch of 9-track tapes he'd been unable to give away at the Trenton Computer Faire. He decided to do the Buddhist thing and not be attached to his possessions, so we Frisbee'd the things into a dumpster. That was probably the same year that I bought the Sun-2 that's sitting in my attic, still unused because I couldn't find the diskless SunOS 3.5 for a Sun-2, only Sun-3 versions :-)
The places you get into trouble are where you're doing fancy dynamic web pages (usually not too much of a problem), or using SSL for all your pages (easy to burn CPU that way) or cranking more disk access than a single IDE drive can handle (not the problem here), or maybe doing aggressive database applications with it.
Also, terms like "Christianity" and "Judaism" have meaning, and while Christians believe in the Biblical books used by the Jews, they're Jewish books, and we're the latecomers here.
Too much of the GRUB documentation is about how it can act like a shell that you negotiate with, rather than just editing a file. You've answered what I needed to know - thanks!
The biggest problems the cable modem companies had, beyond their initial technical learning and of course the supply of capital, were how to get subscribers to buy the stuff. The way to do that is to have really cool applications that need broadband, and the way to get them is NOT for cablecos to think them up and offer them in walled gardens, it's to make the tools available for then net to invent and discover them (either by users or by commercial companies - it doesn't matter to them.) Anything they do which makes that not happen is seriously detrimental to their success, and the fact that they squashed server development during the Internet Boom means they lost the chance to have VCs funding it. On the other hand, a few more years of Moore's Law have increased disk space and processor capability on home machines and game consoles, and decreased the costs of hardware widgets (e.g. little firewall appliances), so that may get them some development that didn't happen in 1990.
Most cable companies had three opinions about Napster - the official ones were "Servers - BAD!" and "Copyright violaters - BAD! BAD!", and the unofficial opinions were "Well, Duhh, why do you think people buy cable modems, it's so they can download music." The current equivalent problem is Wifi - they really really need to find a way to visualize open Wifi networks as an opportunity to get more customers, rather than a bunch of evil bandwidth-sharing service thieves. Perhaps a tunneled gateway service that would let them charge $5/month for WiFi access to anybody who's already a cable subscriber and $20/month to anybody who's not?
He's made a couple of trollish comments on this topic. It's obviously not abetting a crime to host a torrent for something you're allowed to copy freely, so things like Linux ISOs and Jam Band Concert Tapes are just fine.
Napster, the obvious first example of P2P file sharing, maintained a centralized index of everything it knew about, which was one reason it could be sued to death, so most of the newer file-sharing applications found ways to also decentralize their indexing (which is harder.) BitTorrent avoids the whole problem - the person running the tracker is the person publishing the file, and the indexes of who has what pieces are transitory. So if the distribution is legitimate, fine, and if it's not, the copyright owner can go sue the publisher who ripped them off.
So from an applications standpoint, yes, the person distributing a file can sometimes use it like Akamai or AT&T or Speedera to ship their stuff out faster, except that it's quasi-free because it's using the downloaders' bandwidths instead of a big caching service's bandwidth. But one big difference is that BitTorrent is designed to handle big files, while the caching services can handle anything - so they're useful for keeping your front page from being slashdotted (or superbowl-commercialed), and for the graphics on your front page, as well as for distributing the new release of your music CD or your software update. The caching services also provide a function that BT doesn't, which is accelerating delivery of small files by delivering them from nearby servers - instead of hauling them 50ms across the continent or 200ms across the Pacific, you're grabbing them from nearby, while BT requires an index hit from the tracker before fetching content. BT scales very closely with demand volume because it is P2P, so the more demand there is, the more servers there are to fill it - the caching services scale because they've got big honking servers spread around the net.
LGPL, the FSF's Library GPL is designed to fix this problem. You can distribute GPL-ish free code, and people can use it (and agree to distribute its source code, and letting people modify it) without it infecting the rest of their code. Stallman's taken to calling it the "Lesser GPL" becaue it's less radical than he is... It's also useful for adding Free Software to existing systems that have other licenses, whether they're Berkeley-type or binary-only hardware drivers or whatever.
The company's article says that there are other things going on, which they can't talk about because there's a lawsuit pending. If that's not true, and they're really doing it because they're embarassed about it being reported to the police, then they should presumably have also fired the supervisor who reported it. Sounds like there are multiple sets of ugliness and stupidity going on here...
The standard Windows file manager in recent Windows versions will show you little icons for files indicating what type they are, but you can also set it to show thumbnails of pictures, or big icons, or other kinds of views. And you can customize the view on a per-directory basis, so you can look at your source code directories as a list of filenames, and your My Pictures directory as thumbnails.
So this wasn't someone who'd right-click-saved thumbnails of pictures and not the full-sized pictures, this was the Windows file browser showing thumbnails of whatever-sized pictures had been saved.
How well does Gentoo work on the same system with other distros? I'd like to try it in its own partition to see if I like it, but I don't want to mess with the partitioning scheme, and my system is running GRUB because Mandrake wanted that - is it easy to add a Gentoo along with that? (It's easy with LILO, but I confess I haven't spent enough time messing with GRUB to be comfortable with it.) And of course it *can't* mess with any of the Windoze partitions, because they've got my tax software and backups of my work system.
This is especially a problem for programmer-types who need to get uninterrupted concentration, and can't do that in the daytime because they have cubicles rather than offices.
I tend to check my email before going to sleep, and one of my coworkers in Boston often gets started early in the morning - we've had email conversations at 2am on occasion.
Rob Pike introduced a speech on his 8.5 windowing system for Plan 9 by saying "Ken Thompson and I spent 10 years learning what things windowing systems shouldn't do and wrote one that doesn't do them." He typed 8 1/2 (in Unicode :-) into the terminal he was using and the windowing system was booted and running in about the same amount of time you'd expect it to take to get a $ prompt back. (This was running on a Gnot, which was using NextStation hardware, grayscale screen, and I think about 4MIPS worth of 680x0.) The Acme GUI on top of it was lean and mean, but really fast and while it was tuned for a programming environment, it really could run graphical-type programs as well as text with boxes around it. I forget if the size of the code was 64KB of C or 64K lines. Either way, it was much much smaller than X.
Sure, drivers are a big deal, but window managers also make a big difference. Blackbox or pick-your-favorite-flavor-of TWM are a lot faster than something like Enlightenment or whatever Gnome is defaulting to these days.
NeXT also did some Display Postscript things that weren't as cool as NeWS, but still were good display environments.
A brief look at the picogui web pages found 10 different themes for the eye-candy set and 0, count'em, zero, applications. If I wanted that, I could run MGR
(Howto, Screenshot),
which does have actual applications (not that anybody's maintained it in years, but it's small and lightweight and at least used to be really fast back when computers were slow)
or some of the Other Obsolete Operating Systems.
The site is heavily Slashdotted and the Google caches of it have gone wonky since I started reading it so perhaps there's something there. On the other hand, I saw information about how to be a developer using the system, and nothing about what applications had actually been developed for it. (Similarly, for PicoGUI, I saw downloads for
about 10 cool themes, and 0 applications that use it...)
Yup. You may already see the page fast enough, but that's *using* pagerank - Calculating pagerank is a separate process, and if they can do it five times faster, they can either spend less money calculating it, or calculate it more frequently so it stays more current.
The usual way to handle large numbers of plaintiffs in a lawsuit is to do a class action thing; this would be easy if you had all the names, but of course the obvious way to contact them would be .... spamming them :-)
On the other hand, Repo Man did a nice spoof of this trend by using white-packaged "Generic Whatever" for most of the obvious consumbles in the film.
It might bother me a bit if the next sequel The Matrix Remarketed has Tank sending Neo to a Coke machine as an exit instead of a phone...