I've heard rumour that Perl and PHP we going to merge back together now that they've hit version number parity again and that's why there's a massive delay with PHP 6 as well?
I'd argue that's a technicality but live by the sword, die by the sword, I can't argue when Wikipedia uses Mastercard and Visa as the primary example of duopoly eh?:^) I'd still prefer to use the word monopoly in this case on the basis that the term carries greater negative connotations in the context and society in general and also on the Duck principle i.e. if it looks and quacks like one...
> Any company, including payment processors, have the right to not do business with companies that violate the law. They aren't making a moral decision but a legal one.
Except when they are participant in a monopoly or near monopoly (especially where collusion may be suspected), you may find the following links of interest...
Given the current tendency for homogenization within the financial and payment processing industry the principal of USO should be extended into those areas. As another poster has mentioned the basic principals of Common Carrier Status could also be applied to the financial industry now that it has become an essential pillar of modern civilisations, people should consider whether it remains in their interests to allow the basic provision of these facilities to remain in the hands of private enterprise or whether the state should provide at least the very basic facilities for all it's citizens (see proposals for the Royal Mail/British Post Office). I am not however suggesting anything near or like the wholesale or even part nationalisation of financial industries, I think we have plenty of examples where that ends up.
Excluding government enforced break ups as a separate action for a moment the results of USO and common carrier status on the telecommunications industry has been largely positive in many examples.
Unless, and this is postulating a fair bit, that organisation wished to ensure the consistency of response between two independently run, organisationally compartmentalized systems by some other separate communications back channel? But yeah it does make you wonder what's going on there doesn't it?
If a government decided that the Internet had become "critical national infrastructure" and that a reliable, independently verifiable DNS system was a crucial component of that system then they'd not only have at minimum N+1 separate DNS servers but would also consider separating the management and operation hierarchy of those servers.
If I were designing such a system then (using British institutions)...
1) I'd have the Foreign Office running one, Nominet another, a coalition of (ISP/hosting) businesses another and then charge CESG with establishing an independent, isolated network for verifying responses and ensuring it's integrity. Obviously you'd DNSSEC the whole thing, have some hosted in your embassies in other countries perhaps, maybe do NTP and/or some PKI system at the same time. When I say "one" I mean an any-cast system backed by distributed servers in reality, hence you'd be protected by a geographically diverse, triply redundant set of N+1 systems run by separate organisations ensuring against infiltration/subversion or some sort of inherent system flaw taking them all out at the same time. 2) ???? 3) PROFIT!!!
Anyone checked the ratio of those two black boxes to ensure neither is in the proportions of 1:4:9? Maybe the wrist worn one is a 16 dimensional monolith whose projection into our space turns out to be in the form of a Möbius strip. If they aren't monoliths then Slashdot has really hit silly season.
I know, I know, insanely wishful thinking. Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models. Maybe we should have a third party create the standard and then pressure Microsoft into signing up for it?
No wait! It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business model, I believe agreeing to a standard falls into the "Embrace" stage! Then in about 18 months they can extend it with a proprietary DRM system that fscks every other OS.
1. Embrace boot loader standard. 2. Extend boot loader standard with DRM. 3. Extinguish alternative OSes. 4. PROFIT!!!
Only those of us 31337 enough not to have Windows installed in the first place (or who can reinstall their boot loaders) will remain on Slashdot to bitch about M$ whilst Steve Job's umper lumpers will come up with a much sexier way to load their booters. Makes sense to me anyway.
Back to plot for a moment... sounds like someone wasn't drinking the kool-aid when they designed GRUB 2 frankly. It might be epic fail for applications to go fiddling in un-partitioned areas but it's still regular fail for the boot loader to be off doing the same without it being a well understood convention like the boot sector.
What happens when you want to back it up? Does dumping the MBR or taking a snapshot of the partitions capture this extra info or am I missing something?
I've heard this argument before, that it's not theft/stealing because you aren't depriving the victim of any physical asset, this is however disingenuous at best. You may not be depriving them of the talk's content or IP but you are depriving them of the bandwidth needed to deliver it.
I'd agree that in the real world the organizers would be buying such bandwidth in big chunks and that would imply that the odd hacker streaming it for free wouldn't push them over the edge of throughput capacity but it's quite possible that they're paying by amount used, amount used above a certain burst limit or that they don't factor that increased demand into next years budget and hence spend more on it the following year.
Basically, you are depriving someone of real a physical asset, bandwidth or otherwise as someone else pointed out the money spent on that bandwidth so can we drop this "It's not stealing because I'm not depriving anyone" crutch?
Finally, just because I've punched a logical hole in this particular point of contention you should not conclude that I don't, in some more general way agree with you on a wider standpoint.
If you've got an Oracle site license you might want to check that you don't get free support of unbreakable, although that might only be if your a platinum partner or something. RedHat is slick but there is something to be said to being able to turn to Oracle and Oracle alone and just say "OS or DB we don't care, fix it, FIX IT NOW!!"
From all the articles I've seen regarding the various Google product's modus operandi the "consumer grade" disks are used in only two cases, either...
1) To store the data closer to processing elements that needs it (BigTable? or MapReduce), in which case failure of a critical disk could be treaeted as a failed PE and the job re-queued on a different PE or set of PEs (i.e. non-latency sensitive work)...or...
2) In massive redundancy (GFS) for systems where "redoing" part of the job either isn't practical, relevant or applicable....you can make a reasonable bet that any "output" data sets such as BI/MIS reports or "end product" data sets are then shipped off and made available to whatever audience needs it via something a little more conventional like a SAN. Single, whole "input" data-sets are probably treated the same either kept on something boring and normal like a SAN or re-scanned/built/trawled if a subsection is lost from a set that is formed from a composite.
You do know that Lotus is commonly held to stand for "Loads Of Trouble Usually Serious" and that it usually relates to mechanical problems with the engine?
That said to mitigate getting marked as a Troll I don't think that slander has had any serious merit for more than a decade. I believe some also inferred the accusation occasionally related to the suspension which, given Lotus are generally the go to people for handling would suggest that it's only because they try so hard in the first place that they occasionally chucked out a duffer. Like Aston or Lancia many moons ago.
Anyway, mines the Exige 260 in nose-bleed orange please;^)
I'm very sorry but you'll have to turn in your geek card at the desk on your way out. You've also invalidated any opinion you hold on this matter.
IT'S SPELT PRATCHETT YOU IDIOT! WITH ANOTHER "T"!
Stand in the corner and put this conical hat on.
And I don't know what the rest of you are sniggering at, I don't see any of you mentioning Pratchett! Eh, eh? Ruddy obvious answer, the man's a frick'in genius.
Is this "moonlet" curiously rectangular in shape with dimensions in the ratio of 1:4:9 per chance?...but the picture in TFA does in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to a monolith reflecting light off it's thin side and I don't want labelled as a complete mad-hatter so I'll just pitch one up for the real fruit-loops to bat out of the park instead...
Better yet, do as Flash and Skype do and host your own repository. Invest a little money and you could probably do it over HTTPS assigning a unique key to each user, bill on that subscription, update the key yearly, anyone deliberately releasing their key or anyone who doesn't store it securely gets held libel for the subsequent piracy. Not difficult to check up on... "Hmm same key, two different IPs?" Even a laptop could be "homed" to only work from your own home broadband IP if the retailers wanted to be anal.
65 terabytes? Shirley you don't need a full install of Vista just for a file server?
Come on... the "Libraries of Congress" gag has been done so it only left me with the "in Soviet Russia" line, "...profit" or generic Microsoft bashing.;^P
It starts of innocently enough, breakfast, assam, green but it rapidly goes downhill when you get to things like lapsang-souchong and they wouldn't let me use Mister either.
MD: Why is the mail still not working! Me: Because I can't remember how to spell souchong!
That's even more worrying given the amount of rhetoric Open Source throws at Microsoft for not adhering to standards. Not sticking an uninstall option in the Add/Remove programs list might be seen as a bit more than remiss.
Very, very true but I can see the scenario of a *EO looking over a Sys Admin's shoulder and saying "How did you customize that desktop like that" and someone replying "Oh, it's KDE. You can try that on Windows these days" and it ending with the *EO thinking Linux/KDE is a pile-o-crap because he can't even use the Kate editor smoothly.
Just need to be careful is all I'm saying, we don't want to start acquiring the "Buggy, Alpha quality software" slur again. We've come along way since there was even a possibility of that being leveled as a truth.
...the article doesn't make it as clear as KDE's website that this "is experimental state" (sic).
Given KDE's recent experiences people should be more careful about opening themselves or others to accusations of punting Alpha quality software as Beta or Beta as production.
Apparently even Kate doesn't work? I'm not knocking their work as this is a very important bridge for moving people from Windows to *N!X or at least moving Open Source software from *N!X to Windows and clearly something that takes great care, planning and skill in execution. However we don't want people's first expirience of Open Source to be buggy unresponsive software with empty error message boxes!
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard rumour that Perl and PHP we going to merge back together now that they've hit version number parity again and that's why there's a massive delay with PHP 6 as well?
I'd argue that's a technicality but live by the sword, die by the sword, I can't argue when Wikipedia uses Mastercard and Visa as the primary example of duopoly eh? :^)
I'd still prefer to use the word monopoly in this case on the basis that the term carries greater negative connotations in the context and society in general and also on the Duck principle i.e. if it looks and quacks like one...
> Any company, including payment processors, have the right to not do business with companies that violate the law. They aren't making a moral decision but a legal one.
Except when they are participant in a monopoly or near monopoly (especially where collusion may be suspected), you may find the following links of interest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_service_obligation
Given the current tendency for homogenization within the financial and payment processing industry the principal of USO should be extended into those areas. As another poster has mentioned the basic principals of Common Carrier Status could also be applied to the financial industry now that it has become an essential pillar of modern civilisations, people should consider whether it remains in their interests to allow the basic provision of these facilities to remain in the hands of private enterprise or whether the state should provide at least the very basic facilities for all it's citizens (see proposals for the Royal Mail/British Post Office). I am not however suggesting anything near or like the wholesale or even part nationalisation of financial industries, I think we have plenty of examples where that ends up.
Excluding government enforced break ups as a separate action for a moment the results of USO and common carrier status on the telecommunications industry has been largely positive in many examples.
Unless, and this is postulating a fair bit, that organisation wished to ensure the consistency of response between two independently run, organisationally compartmentalized systems by some other separate communications back channel? But yeah it does make you wonder what's going on there doesn't it?
If a government decided that the Internet had become "critical national infrastructure" and that a reliable, independently verifiable DNS system was a crucial component of that system then they'd not only have at minimum N+1 separate DNS servers but would also consider separating the management and operation hierarchy of those servers.
If I were designing such a system then (using British institutions)...
1) I'd have the Foreign Office running one, Nominet another, a coalition of (ISP/hosting) businesses another and then charge CESG with establishing an independent, isolated network for verifying responses and ensuring it's integrity. Obviously you'd DNSSEC the whole thing, have some hosted in your embassies in other countries perhaps, maybe do NTP and/or some PKI system at the same time. When I say "one" I mean an any-cast system backed by distributed servers in reality, hence you'd be protected by a geographically diverse, triply redundant set of N+1 systems run by separate organisations ensuring against infiltration/subversion or some sort of inherent system flaw taking them all out at the same time.
2) ????
3) PROFIT!!!
How hard can it be?
Anyone checked the ratio of those two black boxes to ensure neither is in the proportions of 1:4:9?
Maybe the wrist worn one is a 16 dimensional monolith whose projection into our space turns out to be in the form of a Möbius strip.
If they aren't monoliths then Slashdot has really hit silly season.
I know, I know, insanely wishful thinking. Unfortunately there is no benefit for either Apple or Microsoft to ever agree to even the concept of multi-boot since it is against their respective business models. Maybe we should have a third party create the standard and then pressure Microsoft into signing up for it?
No wait! It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business model, I believe agreeing to a standard falls into the "Embrace" stage! Then in about 18 months they can extend it with a proprietary DRM system that fscks every other OS.
1. Embrace boot loader standard.
2. Extend boot loader standard with DRM.
3. Extinguish alternative OSes.
4. PROFIT!!!
Only those of us 31337 enough not to have Windows installed in the first place (or who can reinstall their boot loaders) will remain on Slashdot to bitch about M$ whilst Steve Job's umper lumpers will come up with a much sexier way to load their booters. Makes sense to me anyway.
Back to plot for a moment... sounds like someone wasn't drinking the kool-aid when they designed GRUB 2 frankly. It might be epic fail for applications to go fiddling in un-partitioned areas but it's still regular fail for the boot loader to be off doing the same without it being a well understood convention like the boot sector.
What happens when you want to back it up? Does dumping the MBR or taking a snapshot of the partitions capture this extra info or am I missing something?
I've been an editor (copy editor, proofreader, senior editor, etc.) for 10 years now.
Don't worry, no one's perfect. We can't all be system administrators.
I've heard this argument before, that it's not theft/stealing because you aren't depriving the victim of any physical asset, this is however disingenuous at best. You may not be depriving them of the talk's content or IP but you are depriving them of the bandwidth needed to deliver it.
I'd agree that in the real world the organizers would be buying such bandwidth in big chunks and that would imply that the odd hacker streaming it for free wouldn't push them over the edge of throughput capacity but it's quite possible that they're paying by amount used, amount used above a certain burst limit or that they don't factor that increased demand into next years budget and hence spend more on it the following year.
Basically, you are depriving someone of real a physical asset, bandwidth or otherwise as someone else pointed out the money spent on that bandwidth so can we drop this "It's not stealing because I'm not depriving anyone" crutch?
Finally, just because I've punched a logical hole in this particular point of contention you should not conclude that I don't, in some more general way agree with you on a wider standpoint.
I administer an online bingo site and just had a panicky moment whilst reading that headline. "Security, Bingo? Erk!"
> So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question
You're saying he has us exactly where he wants us then?
£3,290 per year, the maximum and pretty much uniform amount chargeable in the UK. For comparison try this http://www.studentfinance.direct.gov.uk/portal/page?_pageid=153,4680136&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
If you've got an Oracle site license you might want to check that you don't get free support of unbreakable, although that might only be if your a platinum partner or something. RedHat is slick but there is something to be said to being able to turn to Oracle and Oracle alone and just say "OS or DB we don't care, fix it, FIX IT NOW!!"
From all the articles I've seen regarding the various Google product's modus operandi the "consumer grade" disks are used in only two cases, either...
1) To store the data closer to processing elements that needs it (BigTable? or MapReduce), in which case failure of a critical disk could be treaeted as a failed PE and the job re-queued on a different PE or set of PEs (i.e. non-latency sensitive work) ...or...
2) In massive redundancy (GFS) for systems where "redoing" part of the job either isn't practical, relevant or applicable. ...you can make a reasonable bet that any "output" data sets such as BI/MIS reports or "end product" data sets are then shipped off and made available to whatever audience needs it via something a little more conventional like a SAN. Single, whole "input" data-sets are probably treated the same either kept on something boring and normal like a SAN or re-scanned/built/trawled if a subsection is lost from a set that is formed from a composite.
Check out these...
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CommentView.aspx?guid=7D244266-E3AB-4636-985D-BEE5C0BFC485
http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
1. http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/intro.apc.php
Can't be bothered reading the rest of your post, real men use assembler.
You do know that Lotus is commonly held to stand for "Loads Of Trouble Usually Serious" and that it usually relates to mechanical problems with the engine?
That said to mitigate getting marked as a Troll I don't think that slander has had any serious merit for more than a decade. I believe some also inferred the accusation occasionally related to the suspension which, given Lotus are generally the go to people for handling would suggest that it's only because they try so hard in the first place that they occasionally chucked out a duffer. Like Aston or Lancia many moons ago.
Anyway, mines the Exige 260 in nose-bleed orange please ;^)
Perhaps I should have put that as...
1984) The Man.
"I am not a number! I am The Man, the Cowboy Neal Man."
In a web 3.0 show-down who would win?
1) Hackers.
2) Pirates.
3) Phishers.
4) Ninjas.
5) The Man.
5) Cowboy Neal.
Missing option being a tag-team of Chuck Norris and Angelina Jolie.
I'm very sorry but you'll have to turn in your geek card at the desk on your way out.
You've also invalidated any opinion you hold on this matter.
IT'S SPELT PRATCHETT YOU IDIOT! WITH ANOTHER "T"!
Stand in the corner and put this conical hat on.
And I don't know what the rest of you are sniggering at, I don't see any of you mentioning Pratchett! Eh, eh? Ruddy obvious answer, the man's a frick'in genius.
Well I was going to make the following joke...
Is this "moonlet" curiously rectangular in shape with dimensions in the ratio of 1:4:9 per chance? ...but the picture in TFA does in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to a monolith reflecting light off it's thin side and I don't want labelled as a complete mad-hatter so I'll just pitch one up for the real fruit-loops to bat out of the park instead...
Better yet, do as Flash and Skype do and host your own repository. Invest a little money and you could probably do it over HTTPS assigning a unique key to each user, bill on that subscription, update the key yearly, anyone deliberately releasing their key or anyone who doesn't store it securely gets held libel for the subsequent piracy. Not difficult to check up on... "Hmm same key, two different IPs?" Even a laptop could be "homed" to only work from your own home broadband IP if the retailers wanted to be anal.
65 terabytes? Shirley you don't need a full install of Vista just for a file server?
Come on... the "Libraries of Congress" gag has been done so it only left me with the "in Soviet Russia" line, "...profit" or generic Microsoft bashing. ;^P
It starts of innocently enough, breakfast, assam, green but it rapidly goes downhill when you get to things like lapsang-souchong and they wouldn't let me use Mister either.
MD: Why is the mail still not working!
Me: Because I can't remember how to spell souchong!
It doesn't fly, trust me ;^)
That's even more worrying given the amount of rhetoric Open Source throws at Microsoft for not adhering to standards. Not sticking an uninstall option in the Add/Remove programs list might be seen as a bit more than remiss.
There's a discussion on the matter...
http://forum.kde.org/how-to-remove-kde-from-windows-t-20596.html
Very, very true but I can see the scenario of a *EO looking over a Sys Admin's shoulder and saying "How did you customize that desktop like that" and someone replying "Oh, it's KDE. You can try that on Windows these days" and it ending with the *EO thinking Linux/KDE is a pile-o-crap because he can't even use the Kate editor smoothly.
Just need to be careful is all I'm saying, we don't want to start acquiring the "Buggy, Alpha quality software" slur again. We've come along way since there was even a possibility of that being leveled as a truth.
...the article doesn't make it as clear as KDE's website that this "is experimental state" (sic).
Given KDE's recent experiences people should be more careful about opening themselves or others to accusations of punting Alpha quality software as Beta or Beta as production.
Apparently even Kate doesn't work? I'm not knocking their work as this is a very important bridge for moving people from Windows to *N!X or at least moving Open Source software from *N!X to Windows and clearly something that takes great care, planning and skill in execution. However we don't want people's first expirience of Open Source to be buggy unresponsive software with empty error message boxes!