First off, academic bandwidth should be used for academic purposes. Sure, limited personal use is fine but its main purpose isn't entertainment. That being said, I know my university doesn't care if you run SETI@Home but do care when you run Kazzaa or other file sharing software. I think that's a good stand by the administrators. My university doesn't force anyone to use their network services. (They actually encourage you to get @Home.) If you want to use P2P software, get @Home or DSL and do whatever you want.
I'm not sure in the States, but in Canada Universities have very small budgets that are being cut yearly. I'd rather the University had a decent network and focus spending on research rather than worry about supporting P2P stuff.
I've used XML extensively and in someways agree with people saying XML isn't a storage format. But right now there are lots of applications where XML is the perfect storage format. Example: Consider a order processing company who brokers orders for company to company. One option would be to define a monolthic db schema to take care of what each company would like in their order. Another would be to define a really abstract schema to facilitate handling generic order forms. The problem with the first is, each time XYZ wants something added to an order form, you need to change the schema. With the second, it'll work but you'll need exceptionally discplined and smart programmers to deal with the abstract layer. This doesn't even deal with migration issues.
The solution is XML. You create a XML Schema and start storing stuff. Some company wants more parameters - no problem, extend the schema. You need to migrate previous XML docs to adhere to the current schema, use XSLT. Or you can add these as optional parameters and every document that exists already will conform to the schema.
Speed in XML is an issue. But people who think you need to read the entire XML document to process don't know what they're talking about. You can do modular processing. Also, you can do smart indexing to increase speed. And in a production environment, you turn Schema cheking off unless you're getting documents from untrusted sources. Will XML ever be as fast as RDBMS? Probably not. But XML doesn't store relational data. And with current research in XML Query languages, I'm sure XML's speed will be good enough for most applications in the future that deal with fuzzy schemas. (If you need high performance DB, then you have to bite the bullet and use a RDBMS).
One of my friends who visited Intel Research saw this really cool storage solution. It basically had a huge current accessable terabyte storage system. He told me it wasn't a magnetic based storage. At a certain low point in the day, the storage would be archived to a magnetic form. It was used for storage of movies actually. He mentioned that it was optical based. I'm not sure about that though.
Also, NASA and some hospitals achieve the level of image storage that you're looking for. And hospitals need quick retrival. A distributed solution might also do it. Write to harddrive and then backup to tape?
What's next? This is evidence of how MS is slowly trying to mold the average Joe's mind to make them ripe for the.NET knockout. Why do you think they picked idiot? Idiots will think that word doesn't exist and believe that they aren't idiots. MS is sneaky!!
It's interesting to see what the music industry is trying. First, they try it on a pretty obscure band to see what kind of response they get. I'm assuming they got a favourable response since they're doing the same thing with this CD.
This is an important step because NSync is a very popular band. They might not be popular in this crowd, but they are pretty big. And if they're willing to take a risk doing this, it means they're pretty certain of the response. They wouldn't risk it if they thought they'd loose millions this way right?
We can bitch about RIAA but we have to look at the big picture. If it succeeds (like I think it will) what are the consequences and what can we do? Complaining to the RIAA won't work. But we can try and convince the artists themselves. Each year, a new band comes out that's pretty decent. And usually, this band wants to make good music along with big bucks. If we had a model that garuanteed them a lot of money and also made it easy to have digital music that you can take anywhere, we'd be one step closer to winning this battle.
So, who's doing this? I know of a few organizations but really are we trying our best? Coming up with a business model is an art but it's just like coming up with new algorithms except it takes into account the business world. I want to stress that the business world does have rules. Maybe we need to start thinking hard about a better proposal for upcoming artists.
For those of you who are recultant to believe me, read about "The Body Shop". The owner stood for something and look what she's built!
So true. If we were to assume that humanity has the potential to survive forever, IP is one of those things which will try and finish us. Do you really think we could have come this far if scientists, musicians and human beings bitched and moaned about IP and didn't publish their findings openly? NO WAY!!! Sure there are some people who might not have become rich, but the world is nonetheless a better place and they've helped others make better discoveries.
That's what the goal of academia is. To learn/discover new things that will help us now, but also help the upcoming scientist, no matter where they are, to discover other things, to help them be more productive! IP desires to kill this. I hope and pray it fails!
The future where the society is completely cash less is already here...kind of. I know lots of people who take out cash maybe once a month because certain places or things need cash. For example, you're thirsty and go to a coke machine. Unless you have a dollar on you, there's no way you can get the coke. But for almost everything else from pay phones (Bell Quick change cards) to paying bills to grocery shopping is done almost entirely cash free, by most people. There are of course some people who prefer to use cash.
Even the working poor use debit cards. With banks having deals where you pay a monthly charge for unlimited debit usage it makes sense. Especially people who keep strong financial records, it's much easier to get an account history at the end of the month instead of having to manually keep track of things. This is especially helpful to people on social assistance or disability where the government wants to know how the money is being used. Having a bank record is easier to manage and more believable than written accounts with recipts.
Finally the best part is, if someone steals money from your debit account, the bank will give it back to you. If someone steals your wallet, there's nothing you can do to get it back!
You seem to be loosing it! It definitely is a day of mourning, but life goes on. Do you think we should sit on our sofas watching CNN repeat the same thing over and over again and do nothing? I don't think so. People should try and donate blood, money or whatever to help the victims and definitely carry on with their life. Most likely their life will be in some ways affected by what happened. But to think that a person is a monster or does not have compassion because they refuse to only talk about what happened or "mourn" is foolish. You definitely don't know what you're talking about if you think we're heartless and indifferent because we think about other things.
And on a side note, how exactly should we mourn? A lot of people mourn in various differnt ways. Maybe he actually is mourning by thinking about DVD burners. I know of people who completely block out death of a loved one and focus on something trivial like baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie. This is their way of dealing with the tragedy!!
Of course repercussions are necessary. The question is what do we do? Do you think sending missiles to suspected rouge nations is a good idea? You claim that you need to protect democracy and the American way of life. Well, in your example you site the DEA. They were not democratic. Would you stand by your convictions if you were the one being imprisioned or worse yet killed based on suspecions? This reminds me of China or the Spanish Inquisition or any number of other undemocratic acts.
So, what should be done? There are black boxes on those planes, if they survived. There must be intelligence reports from the CIA and other national security agencies. Two weeks or more to piece together what exactly happened, who was responsible and how they were able to do this without triggers being tripped everywhere. Then suitable punishment - if it's an act of war, then it must be. This is how America got involved with WW2 is it not.
But to suggest that we just blindly give up our democratic freedom is to give these terrorists precisely what they want. I for one am not willing to do that. I'm all for deadly repercussions, but they need to be well thought out and well executed.
The guy in the article fails to grasp that the Internet is fundementally different than what we had before. It's just like the difference between steam power/electricity or horse power/automobile. A lot of historians are looking at the Internet and the information revolution as another wave of the Industrial Revolution. I'd argue that all these.com ventures failed because they tried to replicate existing business processes through the Dnternet. They didn't try to take advantage of what the internet uniquely offers.
For example, companies sell cars using car dealerships. Now, they have sites that sell cars just like the car dealership. The problem here is, these companies aren't taking advantage of what the internet offers. These days, the car companies have realized the problem and have sites that allow you to configure your car or build it to your order. That's something that wouldn't have been possible before for the avegare user because of the problems with the existing infrastructure. (It's still not completely possible because car manufacturers still have existing infrastructure/business processes that isn't compatable.)
Historically, there has been a decade or two lag between a major new innovation and their successful wide spread adoption. (Ex: Cars became hugely popular only after a few decades.) I see no reason why we wouldn't have the same thing with the Internet. Businesses are learning the hard way that you need to innovate and change existing processes to take advantage of the Internet. Dell and Ebay are excellent examples of companies that have figured out what the Internet is about and are taking advantage of it. I'm looking forward to the next decade when companies will really understand how to do business on the Internet and use it to full advantage!
What about ownership? AOL created the AIM protocol. They own it. They can do whatever they want to it. Your arugument that since this is the internet, the protocol should be open doesn't make sense. However, if you think that closed protocols don't make sense you can execrise your right and not use AIM.
The issue at hand is not the nobel struggle of a gaint corporation against the weak single user. It's simply a business doing what is in their best interest without violating anyone else's right. Let's not make it more than that.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, academic bandwidth should be used for academic purposes. Sure, limited personal use is fine but its main purpose isn't entertainment. That being said, I know my university doesn't care if you run SETI@Home but do care when you run Kazzaa or other file sharing software. I think that's a good stand by the administrators. My university doesn't force anyone to use their network services. (They actually encourage you to get @Home.) If you want to use P2P software, get @Home or DSL and do whatever you want.
I'm not sure in the States, but in Canada Universities have very small budgets that are being cut yearly. I'd rather the University had a decent network and focus spending on research rather than worry about supporting P2P stuff.
I've used XML extensively and in someways agree with people saying XML isn't a storage format. But right now there are lots of applications where XML is the perfect storage format. Example: Consider a order processing company who brokers orders for company to company. One option would be to define a monolthic db schema to take care of what each company would like in their order. Another would be to define a really abstract schema to facilitate handling generic order forms. The problem with the first is, each time XYZ wants something added to an order form, you need to change the schema. With the second, it'll work but you'll need exceptionally discplined and smart programmers to deal with the abstract layer. This doesn't even deal with migration issues.
The solution is XML. You create a XML Schema and start storing stuff. Some company wants more parameters - no problem, extend the schema. You need to migrate previous XML docs to adhere to the current schema, use XSLT. Or you can add these as optional parameters and every document that exists already will conform to the schema.
Speed in XML is an issue. But people who think you need to read the entire XML document to process don't know what they're talking about. You can do modular processing. Also, you can do smart indexing to increase speed. And in a production environment, you turn Schema cheking off unless you're getting documents from untrusted sources. Will XML ever be as fast as RDBMS? Probably not. But XML doesn't store relational data. And with current research in XML Query languages, I'm sure XML's speed will be good enough for most applications in the future that deal with fuzzy schemas. (If you need high performance DB, then you have to bite the bullet and use a RDBMS).
My two cents.
One of my friends who visited Intel Research saw this really cool storage solution. It basically had a huge current accessable terabyte storage system. He told me it wasn't a magnetic based storage. At a certain low point in the day, the storage would be archived to a magnetic form. It was used for storage of movies actually. He mentioned that it was optical based. I'm not sure about that though.
Also, NASA and some hospitals achieve the level of image storage that you're looking for. And hospitals need quick retrival. A distributed solution might also do it. Write to harddrive and then backup to tape?
What's next? This is evidence of how MS is slowly trying to mold the average Joe's mind to make them ripe for the .NET knockout. Why do you think they picked idiot? Idiots will think that word doesn't exist and believe that they aren't idiots. MS is sneaky!!
"The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive."
XP is for the smarter user who will finally be able to delete stuff from their hard drive. WOW! The revolution is here.
It's interesting to see what the music industry is trying. First, they try it on a pretty obscure band to see what kind of response they get. I'm assuming they got a favourable response since they're doing the same thing with this CD.
This is an important step because NSync is a very popular band. They might not be popular in this crowd, but they are pretty big. And if they're willing to take a risk doing this, it means they're pretty certain of the response. They wouldn't risk it if they thought they'd loose millions this way right?
We can bitch about RIAA but we have to look at the big picture. If it succeeds (like I think it will) what are the consequences and what can we do? Complaining to the RIAA won't work. But we can try and convince the artists themselves. Each year, a new band comes out that's pretty decent. And usually, this band wants to make good music along with big bucks. If we had a model that garuanteed them a lot of money and also made it easy to have digital music that you can take anywhere, we'd be one step closer to winning this battle.
So, who's doing this? I know of a few organizations but really are we trying our best? Coming up with a business model is an art but it's just like coming up with new algorithms except it takes into account the business world. I want to stress that the business world does have rules. Maybe we need to start thinking hard about a better proposal for upcoming artists.
For those of you who are recultant to believe me, read about "The Body Shop". The owner stood for something and look what she's built!
So true. If we were to assume that humanity has the potential to survive forever, IP is one of those things which will try and finish us. Do you really think we could have come this far if scientists, musicians and human beings bitched and moaned about IP and didn't publish their findings openly? NO WAY!!! Sure there are some people who might not have become rich, but the world is nonetheless a better place and they've helped others make better discoveries.
That's what the goal of academia is. To learn/discover new things that will help us now, but also help the upcoming scientist, no matter where they are, to discover other things, to help them be more productive! IP desires to kill this. I hope and pray it fails!
The future where the society is completely cash less is already here...kind of. I know lots of people who take out cash maybe once a month because certain places or things need cash. For example, you're thirsty and go to a coke machine. Unless you have a dollar on you, there's no way you can get the coke. But for almost everything else from pay phones (Bell Quick change cards) to paying bills to grocery shopping is done almost entirely cash free, by most people. There are of course some people who prefer to use cash.
Even the working poor use debit cards. With banks having deals where you pay a monthly charge for unlimited debit usage it makes sense. Especially people who keep strong financial records, it's much easier to get an account history at the end of the month instead of having to manually keep track of things. This is especially helpful to people on social assistance or disability where the government wants to know how the money is being used. Having a bank record is easier to manage and more believable than written accounts with recipts.
Finally the best part is, if someone steals money from your debit account, the bank will give it back to you. If someone steals your wallet, there's nothing you can do to get it back!
You seem to be loosing it! It definitely is a day of mourning, but life goes on. Do you think we should sit on our sofas watching CNN repeat the same thing over and over again and do nothing? I don't think so. People should try and donate blood, money or whatever to help the victims and definitely carry on with their life. Most likely their life will be in some ways affected by what happened. But to think that a person is a monster or does not have compassion because they refuse to only talk about what happened or "mourn" is foolish. You definitely don't know what you're talking about if you think we're heartless and indifferent because we think about other things.
And on a side note, how exactly should we mourn? A lot of people mourn in various differnt ways. Maybe he actually is mourning by thinking about DVD burners. I know of people who completely block out death of a loved one and focus on something trivial like baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie. This is their way of dealing with the tragedy!!
Of course repercussions are necessary. The question is what do we do? Do you think sending missiles to suspected rouge nations is a good idea? You claim that you need to protect democracy and the American way of life. Well, in your example you site the DEA. They were not democratic. Would you stand by your convictions if you were the one being imprisioned or worse yet killed based on suspecions? This reminds me of China or the Spanish Inquisition or any number of other undemocratic acts.
So, what should be done? There are black boxes on those planes, if they survived. There must be intelligence reports from the CIA and other national security agencies. Two weeks or more to piece together what exactly happened, who was responsible and how they were able to do this without triggers being tripped everywhere. Then suitable punishment - if it's an act of war, then it must be. This is how America got involved with WW2 is it not.
But to suggest that we just blindly give up our democratic freedom is to give these terrorists precisely what they want. I for one am not willing to do that. I'm all for deadly repercussions, but they need to be well thought out and well executed.
The guy in the article fails to grasp that the Internet is fundementally different than what we had before. It's just like the difference between steam power/electricity or horse power/automobile. A lot of historians are looking at the Internet and the information revolution as another wave of the Industrial Revolution. I'd argue that all these .com ventures failed because they tried to replicate existing business processes through the Dnternet. They didn't try to take advantage of what the internet uniquely offers.
For example, companies sell cars using car dealerships. Now, they have sites that sell cars just like the car dealership. The problem here is, these companies aren't taking advantage of what the internet offers. These days, the car companies have realized the problem and have sites that allow you to configure your car or build it to your order. That's something that wouldn't have been possible before for the avegare user because of the problems with the existing infrastructure. (It's still not completely possible because car manufacturers still have existing infrastructure/business processes that isn't compatable.)
Historically, there has been a decade or two lag between a major new innovation and their successful wide spread adoption. (Ex: Cars became hugely popular only after a few decades.) I see no reason why we wouldn't have the same thing with the Internet. Businesses are learning the hard way that you need to innovate and change existing processes to take advantage of the Internet. Dell and Ebay are excellent examples of companies that have figured out what the Internet is about and are taking advantage of it. I'm looking forward to the next decade when companies will really understand how to do business on the Internet and use it to full advantage!
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml
That has a good article on how the programmers at NASA write their software. They're on budget and on time.
What about ownership? AOL created the AIM protocol. They own it. They can do whatever they want to it. Your arugument that since this is the internet, the protocol should be open doesn't make sense. However, if you think that closed protocols don't make sense you can execrise your right and not use AIM.
The issue at hand is not the nobel struggle of a gaint corporation against the weak single user. It's simply a business doing what is in their best interest without violating anyone else's right. Let's not make it more than that.