Google trends shows that while it may be the case that MSN gets more hits and searches, it isn't a case of MSn coming from behind to catch up, it's a case of google coming from behind to have just about evened out the match.
There's nothing different about your spellings; you may have meant something along the lines of "The correct grammar for the names is to capitalise the inital letters in addition to the BSD."
I can see how google will follow the server end of things and eat up the Office market, but I don't see why they'd go out of their way to discuss Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows when they don't even support linux on a lot of their applications. There's no reason to think of the last step besides wishful thinking.
However, it *is* a good possibility that people like you and me will be able to use the no-more-Office argument as a great reason to go from Windows to Linux at the next budget meeting after we start using G-Offfice. We shouldn't dismiss how much financial leverage that would give us in the argument to switch.
It's sure nice to know there's plenty of stability in that direction, every flash drive I've ever broken or damaged has been along the join between the USB adapter and the body of the drive. One time I was sweeping, I picked my laptop up and put it on the couch, not noticing the flash drive was in it, and when I was puitting the laptop back on the floor I bumped the drive on the windowsill and bent the damn thing.
If they could make the link between the USB adapter and the drive itself a little more robust, that'd be great.
I'm a big debian fan, but I need to start exploring scientific linux, which is red hat based. I installed a vm, told it "yum install gaim" and it couldn't find the package. I'm not familiar enough with the yum syntax to be usefully able to help myself out right now; you seem to be more knowledgeable than I am so what do I need to do to perform the equivalent of apt-cache search foo?
Thanks!
I'd just like to clarify that nothing I said was intended to cast doubt upon whether what you said was accurate; reading back I can see how what I wrote can be construed that way, so I wanted to make sure I made mention.
HAving read both the grandparent and the great grandparent, I'm wondering what you're talking about. Using phrases like "a tad off" reads to me like a friendly correction together with the helpful suggestion that the great grandparent do a little more research.
I have a part time job as a local restaurant manager, and this is exactly the kind of thing I need to do about once every month or two. The customer doesn't care that the wine key is broken, and I'd rather have a ten minute inconvenience buying one than lose a fifty dollar wine sale.
I'm almost wondering if your post should be modded as funny. It reminds me of the old standby in the sys admin world: If your computer ain't working, email me about it.
If my wireless card isn't working, copying stuff from a web page might not be the best solution, as I don't usually have internet access then. I could run a wire to my ethernet card, but that would more often than not involve moving my desktop as I usually have my router in a different room.
Of course, I understand that your post was informative in that it may resolve some issues for people, and definitely worth posting, but I found the internal conflict of problem and solution amusing.
From TFA: "But it gets better. To attract current iPod users Microsoft is going to let you download for free any songs you've already bought from the iTunes Music Store. They'll actually scan iTunes for purchased tracks and then automatically add those to your account. Microsoft will still have to pay the rights-holders for the songs, but they believe it'll be worth it to acquire converts to their new player."
Though I'm sure others have pointed this out, I wanted to be certain that there was a comment somewhere inidcating that the GPL actually puts a limit on how much you can charge to send CDs etc with the source on them, so that this is a perfectly legitimate way of getting source out there. It's not a for-profit thing but a for-freedom thing.
There have been several ad-providers who have been using cost-per-action for some time now. An example would be available here . As I understand it, this technology is actually mature and has been put forward several times as a better way to resolve click-fraud than the "just trust us to take care of it" method used thus far by google.
Just be aware that there's a piece of malware going around that performs this function also. It looks like a microsoft box, comes up before you sign in and claims that your copy of windows is not genuine.
From the amazon.com review: "He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers."
Perhaps RMS is suggesting that a lot of people took the overhyped media version of what occured at face value, instead of looking into it for themselves and seeing whether this was truly an open source license?
I already extrapolated exactly this prediction from the data given in a previous article. The evidence I drew this conclusion from was the posted statistics in TFA of the previous note (the article is available here if you don't want to follow too many links).
Another interesting statistic to note is that Nintendo's console's have become less and less expensive as time goes by, even though they're getting more and more powerful. Let's hope the trend continues and see a $200 Wii.
It's a small point, but to get the networking features of OS X, you really ought to have windows XP Professional, adding what, about a hundred dollars? Not an enormous increase, but OS X is better natively on a network than Windows XP Home.
Let me start by addressing your first point here: I recognise that what was typed up as the first comment was just a hasty not-really-thought-through thing. I was rude in how I addressed it, I agree, and I apologise for that. The reason I've kept with the conversation, though, is this is slashdot, a place where tech geeks come together to read interesting articles and then to try and get to neat conclusions about the articles through discussion. I really enjoy the discussion aspect of it.
Ultimately, what I'm seeing as a flaw in the answer above is that costs for the ISPs won't go down at all. The same amount of bandwidth is being used whether google video, say, is distributing content and pissing off an ISP, or whether I'm peering a video and people are downloading it. Because it's the same amount, ISPs will ultimately charge money for that bandwidth. I see the trade off as being that instead of Google paying for the bandwidth five times for five copies, they pay once for one copy and I pay for the other four times.
Now, in all honesty I'm sure that Google and the rest have considered this is a possible way to cut costs. Yet Google and YouTube and whomever go to great troubnles to try and force you not to download the videos straight from your website unless you have their proprietary players available to you. Because if they control the content, they can control the money, plain and simple.
The basis for my point of view is that I honestly think the current system is reasonably good and that the ISPs starting the bullshit that TFA talks about will go nowhere, simply because it's not desirable. Google, MSN, Yahoo, they'll work out a way to squash this idea before it goes anywhere. The reason I believe this is that any true change to the system to try and offset costs using things like peering will end up not really having an effect on costs at all. Because if, say, MSN and Yahoo decided to use peering to deliver content, but Google said it was going to pay the extra price tab and still offer all content through its very fast very reliable server system, I think Google would suddenly leap ahead of every other similar service.
Having said that, I recognise this is just my point of view on the matter. I don't feel smug about it, I think it's fairly well reasoned and I'm willing to discuss it with folks who come along in the hopes of improving it. It's very difficult to detect smugness in text, it's very difficult to detect any true intended emotion in text when you don't know the person on the other end. I tried to be pretty comprehensive in my answers just to show you I'm not talking out of my ass. If I knew your level of knowledge, I could have written considerably shorter replies.
A problem I encounter when troubleshooting with end users is that they often *feel*, patronised when I'm just trying to get to the problem, simply becuase they don't have the necessary expertise to undertand what is going on when I tell them to ping 127.0.0.0 - I get told "Oh, that told us nothing" because it worked correctly, when it told me a lot about what I don't need to worry about any longer.
to summarise, I'm not acting how you thought I was acting: that was *your* intepretation, not my intention. I came out strong in my initial comment simply because it's amazing how many people think Kazaa or ShareBear is the answer to life's problems with bandwidth, not realising that there's an entire series of mechanisms dictating how these programs behave at the network level.
It's nice to finally have a cogent example of what you mean, yes. Let's take a few choice quotes thus far, though, to show that this isn't what has been proposed:
"How can you charge one company or another if all their traffic is shared on a peer to peer network" - note that this implies using the physical framework without money passing hands.
"decentralizing everything from web search engines to cnn web casts" - once again, suggesting that the traditional centralised fashion of doing things would be done away with, in favour of some kind of non-server based (i.e. non-centralised) method of spreading content
I reject the notion that I was attacking a straw man, and was instead showing the shortcomings of exactly the model that you were suggesting, irrespective of whether it was the model you intended to suggest.
Decentralised web searching isn't the same thing as publishing a document on a peer to peer network and hoping that it'll remain available. Surfing the web depends upon centralisation, in fact *is* centralisation of content in its purest form. And if you bear in mind how a search engine actually works, you'll note that search engines simply could not exist without centralised knowledge
Why you defend the idea that a company like CNN is going to release its web newscasts on the peer to peer networks when this is exactly the kind of thing they are trying to put a halt to is beyond me. After all, most media companies seem to view their shows as their property which they don't want released without a kickback of some kind. I don't forsee any kind of licensing agreements being reached. The content would need to be protected by some kind of DRM to prevent unlicensed distribution and, as is often demonstrated, there is no DRM which cannot be cracked. We reach the same point at which we are right now: if you are going to spread content via the internet, and you recognise the absolute futility of DRM, then you have to do something like Apple have done: provide a reliable, inexpensive method of acquiring content. It has to be inexpensive at both ends, both serving the content and receiving the content. THe peer to peer networks appear to do this, but in fact the inexpensive cost of receiving the content is going to be offset somewhere. The bandwidth that you're using to spread the free content on a peer to peer network is going to be provided, according to your post above, by an ISP. And once you start involving ISPs, you introduce tracking.
Your assertion that "there is no way to track who is directly responsible for the content being distributed" is irrelevant, as there is a way to track how much content is being distributed. That's the system that we use right now. If an end user is peering out a copy of, say, an ubuntu.iso file, then the amount of traffic being generated is tracked very simply. And that person will pay for that amount of traffic.
In short, your proposal will find its logical conclusion at the current system. Which is not the system that TFA was discussing.
They really helped me get a better idea of what kind of community member linspire is. In short, they're a pretty fucking good one, and if they use some proprietary technology to make money, well, RedHat uses a proprietary trademark to make money and so on. I don't begrudge anyone the chance to make a living.
Let's take a real world example: torrents. No central server is *necessary* for just the data transfer, traffic and bandwidth are shared out amongst the users. The users get their bandwidth from... that's right, an ISP they have paid for the bandwidth. Let's follow your thought through to its conclusion: remove all ISPs and suddenly we don't have to pay.
I'd love to know how you're going to accomplish removal of the ISPs. Given that you personally lay cat6 cable throughout your local town so that everyone can plug in to this intranet, who is going to pay for the cable? You are. Someone is always going to be in the position of needing to fork out money for the infrastructure.
In short, there is always a necessary outlay to finance the venture.
There are other issues, too. In this massively decentralised network, who is going to be the DHCP server? You could attempt to use autoconf or some other implementation, but you'd be fucked when it came to trying to make a large network. Why? Because broadcasts don't travel over routers. You'll need a DHCP server to manage things, and as soon as you implement one point of contact for everyone, you start implementing a method for tracking everyone. You'll need routers on your decentralised network, switches, the whole nine yards. And all of this will cost money.
In short (again), you cannot have a massive peer to peer network with any current technology, and as soon as you start introducing servers and whatnot you *will* have someone who wants to charge other people to use that server. Whoever spent the cash on the infrastructure is likely to want to recoup that investment. The very necessities of a network mean that your scenario cannot exist.
Never forget that the internet is essentially already a massive peer to peer network and it has been monetised and there are people looking to make extra cash from it because they're greedy shit bags. If it were all to run again, it'd come out looking reasonably similar.
From Jostiq: "12:58 pm - "With the bow, the Wii remote adds depth of sound. Built-in to the Wii remote is a speaker. You'll hear the bowstring draw taught and you'll hear the bow sound draw to the screen as the arrow is shot. A quick jab with the Wii remote and shield shove. You'll feel the impact with the built-in rumble." Using pointer to launch boomerang. Classic Zelda chime heard on Wii remote speaker. You can pick up crates with the A button and then chuck them with a quick motion"
So the Wii will definitely. Also a built in speaker. Firing a gun will presumably sound local, then. COOL.
Ah yes, and peer to peer networks, of course, don't use silly things like the entire network infrastructure to be able to communicate with each other. They just use magic.
Local peer to peer is doable, where local relatively small, but to get a peer to peer connection from point A to point B a mere mile away becomes a situation that is resolved by the infrastructure that they're now trying to charge us a lot more money for.
Slashdot Mirror
Google trends shows that while it may be the case that MSN gets more hits and searches, it isn't a case of MSn coming from behind to catch up, it's a case of google coming from behind to have just about evened out the match.
There's nothing different about your spellings; you may have meant something along the lines of "The correct grammar for the names is to capitalise the inital letters in addition to the BSD."
I can see how google will follow the server end of things and eat up the Office market, but I don't see why they'd go out of their way to discuss Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows when they don't even support linux on a lot of their applications. There's no reason to think of the last step besides wishful thinking.
However, it *is* a good possibility that people like you and me will be able to use the no-more-Office argument as a great reason to go from Windows to Linux at the next budget meeting after we start using G-Offfice. We shouldn't dismiss how much financial leverage that would give us in the argument to switch.
It's sure nice to know there's plenty of stability in that direction, every flash drive I've ever broken or damaged has been along the join between the USB adapter and the body of the drive. One time I was sweeping, I picked my laptop up and put it on the couch, not noticing the flash drive was in it, and when I was puitting the laptop back on the floor I bumped the drive on the windowsill and bent the damn thing.
If they could make the link between the USB adapter and the drive itself a little more robust, that'd be great.
I'm a big debian fan, but I need to start exploring scientific linux, which is red hat based. I installed a vm, told it "yum install gaim" and it couldn't find the package. I'm not familiar enough with the yum syntax to be usefully able to help myself out right now; you seem to be more knowledgeable than I am so what do I need to do to perform the equivalent of apt-cache search foo? Thanks!
I'd just like to clarify that nothing I said was intended to cast doubt upon whether what you said was accurate; reading back I can see how what I wrote can be construed that way, so I wanted to make sure I made mention.
HAving read both the grandparent and the great grandparent, I'm wondering what you're talking about. Using phrases like "a tad off" reads to me like a friendly correction together with the helpful suggestion that the great grandparent do a little more research.
I have a part time job as a local restaurant manager, and this is exactly the kind of thing I need to do about once every month or two. The customer doesn't care that the wine key is broken, and I'd rather have a ten minute inconvenience buying one than lose a fifty dollar wine sale.
The current DVD encryption algorithms are SO EFFECTIVE! How will ANYONE manage to get around this? All teh warez are dooomed!
I'm almost wondering if your post should be modded as funny. It reminds me of the old standby in the sys admin world: If your computer ain't working, email me about it.
If my wireless card isn't working, copying stuff from a web page might not be the best solution, as I don't usually have internet access then. I could run a wire to my ethernet card, but that would more often than not involve moving my desktop as I usually have my router in a different room.
Of course, I understand that your post was informative in that it may resolve some issues for people, and definitely worth posting, but I found the internal conflict of problem and solution amusing.
Ah, if I had the mod points, I'd do it myself.
From TFA: "But it gets better. To attract current iPod users Microsoft is going to let you download for free any songs you've already bought from the iTunes Music Store. They'll actually scan iTunes for purchased tracks and then automatically add those to your account. Microsoft will still have to pay the rights-holders for the songs, but they believe it'll be worth it to acquire converts to their new player."
Though I'm sure others have pointed this out, I wanted to be certain that there was a comment somewhere inidcating that the GPL actually puts a limit on how much you can charge to send CDs etc with the source on them, so that this is a perfectly legitimate way of getting source out there. It's not a for-profit thing but a for-freedom thing.
There have been several ad-providers who have been using cost-per-action for some time now. An example would be available here . As I understand it, this technology is actually mature and has been put forward several times as a better way to resolve click-fraud than the "just trust us to take care of it" method used thus far by google.
Just be aware that there's a piece of malware going around that performs this function also. It looks like a microsoft box, comes up before you sign in and claims that your copy of windows is not genuine.
From the amazon.com review: "He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers."
Perhaps RMS is suggesting that a lot of people took the overhyped media version of what occured at face value, instead of looking into it for themselves and seeing whether this was truly an open source license?
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185919&c id=15344390
I already extrapolated exactly this prediction from the data given in a previous article. The evidence I drew this conclusion from was the posted statistics in TFA of the previous note (the article is available here if you don't want to follow too many links).
Another interesting statistic to note is that Nintendo's console's have become less and less expensive as time goes by, even though they're getting more and more powerful. Let's hope the trend continues and see a $200 Wii.
It's a small point, but to get the networking features of OS X, you really ought to have windows XP Professional, adding what, about a hundred dollars? Not an enormous increase, but OS X is better natively on a network than Windows XP Home.
Let me start by addressing your first point here: I recognise that what was typed up as the first comment was just a hasty not-really-thought-through thing. I was rude in how I addressed it, I agree, and I apologise for that. The reason I've kept with the conversation, though, is this is slashdot, a place where tech geeks come together to read interesting articles and then to try and get to neat conclusions about the articles through discussion. I really enjoy the discussion aspect of it.
Ultimately, what I'm seeing as a flaw in the answer above is that costs for the ISPs won't go down at all. The same amount of bandwidth is being used whether google video, say, is distributing content and pissing off an ISP, or whether I'm peering a video and people are downloading it. Because it's the same amount, ISPs will ultimately charge money for that bandwidth. I see the trade off as being that instead of Google paying for the bandwidth five times for five copies, they pay once for one copy and I pay for the other four times.
Now, in all honesty I'm sure that Google and the rest have considered this is a possible way to cut costs. Yet Google and YouTube and whomever go to great troubnles to try and force you not to download the videos straight from your website unless you have their proprietary players available to you. Because if they control the content, they can control the money, plain and simple.
The basis for my point of view is that I honestly think the current system is reasonably good and that the ISPs starting the bullshit that TFA talks about will go nowhere, simply because it's not desirable. Google, MSN, Yahoo, they'll work out a way to squash this idea before it goes anywhere. The reason I believe this is that any true change to the system to try and offset costs using things like peering will end up not really having an effect on costs at all. Because if, say, MSN and Yahoo decided to use peering to deliver content, but Google said it was going to pay the extra price tab and still offer all content through its very fast very reliable server system, I think Google would suddenly leap ahead of every other similar service.
Having said that, I recognise this is just my point of view on the matter. I don't feel smug about it, I think it's fairly well reasoned and I'm willing to discuss it with folks who come along in the hopes of improving it. It's very difficult to detect smugness in text, it's very difficult to detect any true intended emotion in text when you don't know the person on the other end. I tried to be pretty comprehensive in my answers just to show you I'm not talking out of my ass. If I knew your level of knowledge, I could have written considerably shorter replies.
A problem I encounter when troubleshooting with end users is that they often *feel*, patronised when I'm just trying to get to the problem, simply becuase they don't have the necessary expertise to undertand what is going on when I tell them to ping 127.0.0.0 - I get told "Oh, that told us nothing" because it worked correctly, when it told me a lot about what I don't need to worry about any longer.
to summarise, I'm not acting how you thought I was acting: that was *your* intepretation, not my intention. I came out strong in my initial comment simply because it's amazing how many people think Kazaa or ShareBear is the answer to life's problems with bandwidth, not realising that there's an entire series of mechanisms dictating how these programs behave at the network level.
It's nice to finally have a cogent example of what you mean, yes. Let's take a few choice quotes thus far, though, to show that this isn't what has been proposed:
"How can you charge one company or another if all their traffic is shared on a peer to peer network" - note that this implies using the physical framework without money passing hands.
"decentralizing everything from web search engines to cnn web casts" - once again, suggesting that the traditional centralised fashion of doing things would be done away with, in favour of some kind of non-server based (i.e. non-centralised) method of spreading content
I reject the notion that I was attacking a straw man, and was instead showing the shortcomings of exactly the model that you were suggesting, irrespective of whether it was the model you intended to suggest.
Decentralised web searching isn't the same thing as publishing a document on a peer to peer network and hoping that it'll remain available. Surfing the web depends upon centralisation, in fact *is* centralisation of content in its purest form. And if you bear in mind how a search engine actually works, you'll note that search engines simply could not exist without centralised knowledge
Why you defend the idea that a company like CNN is going to release its web newscasts on the peer to peer networks when this is exactly the kind of thing they are trying to put a halt to is beyond me. After all, most media companies seem to view their shows as their property which they don't want released without a kickback of some kind. I don't forsee any kind of licensing agreements being reached. The content would need to be protected by some kind of DRM to prevent unlicensed distribution and, as is often demonstrated, there is no DRM which cannot be cracked. We reach the same point at which we are right now: if you are going to spread content via the internet, and you recognise the absolute futility of DRM, then you have to do something like Apple have done: provide a reliable, inexpensive method of acquiring content. It has to be inexpensive at both ends, both serving the content and receiving the content. THe peer to peer networks appear to do this, but in fact the inexpensive cost of receiving the content is going to be offset somewhere. The bandwidth that you're using to spread the free content on a peer to peer network is going to be provided, according to your post above, by an ISP. And once you start involving ISPs, you introduce tracking.
Your assertion that "there is no way to track who is directly responsible for the content being distributed" is irrelevant, as there is a way to track how much content is being distributed. That's the system that we use right now. If an end user is peering out a copy of, say, an ubuntu.iso file, then the amount of traffic being generated is tracked very simply. And that person will pay for that amount of traffic.
In short, your proposal will find its logical conclusion at the current system. Which is not the system that TFA was discussing.
Kevin Carmony has a couple of great Lugradio interviews: the most recent is here and the first, much longer one is available here.
They really helped me get a better idea of what kind of community member linspire is. In short, they're a pretty fucking good one, and if they use some proprietary technology to make money, well, RedHat uses a proprietary trademark to make money and so on. I don't begrudge anyone the chance to make a living.
Let's take a real world example: torrents. No central server is *necessary* for just the data transfer, traffic and bandwidth are shared out amongst the users. The users get their bandwidth from... that's right, an ISP they have paid for the bandwidth. Let's follow your thought through to its conclusion: remove all ISPs and suddenly we don't have to pay.
I'd love to know how you're going to accomplish removal of the ISPs. Given that you personally lay cat6 cable throughout your local town so that everyone can plug in to this intranet, who is going to pay for the cable? You are. Someone is always going to be in the position of needing to fork out money for the infrastructure.
In short, there is always a necessary outlay to finance the venture.
There are other issues, too. In this massively decentralised network, who is going to be the DHCP server? You could attempt to use autoconf or some other implementation, but you'd be fucked when it came to trying to make a large network. Why? Because broadcasts don't travel over routers. You'll need a DHCP server to manage things, and as soon as you implement one point of contact for everyone, you start implementing a method for tracking everyone. You'll need routers on your decentralised network, switches, the whole nine yards. And all of this will cost money.
In short (again), you cannot have a massive peer to peer network with any current technology, and as soon as you start introducing servers and whatnot you *will* have someone who wants to charge other people to use that server. Whoever spent the cash on the infrastructure is likely to want to recoup that investment. The very necessities of a network mean that your scenario cannot exist.
Never forget that the internet is essentially already a massive peer to peer network and it has been monetised and there are people looking to make extra cash from it because they're greedy shit bags. If it were all to run again, it'd come out looking reasonably similar.
From Jostiq: "12:58 pm - "With the bow, the Wii remote adds depth of sound. Built-in to the Wii remote is a speaker. You'll hear the bowstring draw taught and you'll hear the bow sound draw to the screen as the arrow is shot. A quick jab with the Wii remote and shield shove. You'll feel the impact with the built-in rumble." Using pointer to launch boomerang. Classic Zelda chime heard on Wii remote speaker. You can pick up crates with the A button and then chuck them with a quick motion"
So the Wii will definitely. Also a built in speaker. Firing a gun will presumably sound local, then. COOL.
Ah yes, and peer to peer networks, of course, don't use silly things like the entire network infrastructure to be able to communicate with each other. They just use magic.
Local peer to peer is doable, where local relatively small, but to get a peer to peer connection from point A to point B a mere mile away becomes a situation that is resolved by the infrastructure that they're now trying to charge us a lot more money for.