I don't see this fitting with the viewers use-cases.
I see video uses of
Youtube, high quality not needed normally, maybe wanted if when you want to keep a video... ie not streamed.
Films and must watch programs, high (or at least consistent) quality a requirement not suitable for streaming where a loss of connection would stop the film, it must be downloaded or on a stream where you can pick up a phone and swear at someone if it stops.
General programming, low bandwidth essential so as not to waste. News, talking heads, crappy cartoons, daily soap, "Ow My Balls". None of this needs HD.
Live events, you'll take what you're given.
The only one of these where I see a niche for this sort of video transfer is the live events section and the advantage is for the broadcaster not the viewer, in that the system keeps going if it gets oversubscribed.
Then even in the case where it might be useful it's not that good. The best solution would be a form of progressive download, where you get the low res chunks first (used in all cases) and then, if you have time before it gets shown, you add the high resolution details on top. That way the broadcaster's bandwidth to the caches is wasted.
This does tell me one thing though, WTH happened to my webcache. It was wiped out by hundreds of useless little video bits which clogged it up forcing out the useful stuff.
Thinking about it, this video service is probably best at providing a HD stream during the demo without actually having to buy the bandwidth to provide a HD stream during an actual live event...
It's easy to get bits across a border, just make sure you wipe the disk with a secure wiper (dumps randomness on the disk) and reimage it.
Or that's what you say, for all you know the sysadmin guy put five checksummed mirrors under the randomness, say four and a half left now that the machine has been imaged. Maybe that's the reason he gave you a nice 500Gb drive. He doesn't have to worry about you booting it or using it a bit, he just has to make sure it goes wrong when you get back home...
Of course re-imaging is the most reasonable thing in the world to do if the border patrols are known to be... erm... aggressive.
One thing I would suggest is to try to have a robust infrastructure. By that I mean don't depend on the integrity of the software on the PCs or require a specific OS. Locking down a PC works for a while or when you get fired if you break it, but that ain't gonna happen.
The way I would arrange things is to make every PC boot off the network, download a small OS that can image the first partition of the disk from one of a collection of images also stored on the local disk. These images would be checksummed (sha) against images on a central file server.
This way you don't care much if somebody trashes the PCs or needs special versions of Windows/Linux/BSD/LTSP/BYOOS as a reimage will normally take 30 seconds to a minute. Train the teachers how to do this.
You'll probably still want to password the BIOS, but that's a lot easier and less intrusive than trying to lock down Windows without breaking somebodies must have application. You may also want to have a multicast or p2p method of updating the on-disk caches for when you do a big OS upgrade (maybe for monday mornings too).
What you're doing is to try and make sure that anything the little... darlings... do doesn't impact you; but you don't need to go past the point where everybody sees them for the shits they are! (okay, okay, some of them are! Better now?)
You take a very large capacity 5V capacitor and use it to power the 'on standby' electronics. The only job of these electronics is to monitor the wakeup sources, for a TV it's the IR receiver, for a PC it would be the 'standby button', the 'Wake on LAN' and probably a timer. The rest of the TV is turned off, the rest of the PC is put into hibernation, it works and then there's no reason to power an unknown number of gigabytes of high performance RAM.
Why do you do this...
If a switch mode supply is providing any current it has to draw a lot of power from the mains, for very low currents (like when in standby) over 99% of the power drawn by the PSU is wasted as heat in the PSU. OTOH if you take no power from the PSU you can turn it off (in fact modern ones sometimes turn themselves off). Even if you have to 'wakeup' the PSU every day or two to recharge the capacitor there is a considerable saving. But for simple electronics (an IR receiver, a CMOS clock, a 10-Base-T receiver) the capacitor can probably keep things going for weeks or months on it's own.
BTW: If you PC doesn't need to wake on lan or similar you can USE HIBERNATION NOW!
>> No I don't know why that isn't the default by now either...
Because windows runs out of space for it's paging tables and other system data if the amount of physical RAM is more that about 16GB (maybe 12GB if the PCI address space is large) and the/3G flag is on. Plus before it hits a hard limit it's DMA buffers are reduced, these are buffers for devices that cannot DMA to an address above 4GB. This may impact performance for cheaper devices.
Of course some drivers can't cope with/3G but these are rather rare nowadays.
If you consider the "REAL" memory to be that stuff that's normally labeled "cache".
Example this Athlon 64 had 1MB of physical memory on the CPU divided into "pages" of 8 bytes. If your working set is less than a megabyte you will be running entirely from this memory and running very very fast.
As soon as you start 'paging out' to the so called "main memory" your performance takes a dive.
The only differences between this and the level normally mentioned are speed, size and the fact that this level is usually controlled completely by the hardware.
The rule really simple, if you can't drop everything and have sex because of work then you're on working time.
So it includes being in the car or on the train, it doesn't include your morning shower though!
If the employer feels that this point in time isn't in your per hour rate all that means is that it's dropping their hourly rate to below the Mc'D down the road. You know what to do.
Of course the problem is some people don't know what to do, or don't think they can do it.
BTW: If you get home and are too tired that time should probably be included too! OTOH TIPS should NOT be included, they aren't paid by the employer after all.
Personally I think the gvim GUI is fine; those tear off menus are sweet.
My only real problem with vim is that sometimes it seems a little overweight but I can never point to something I think should go... I suppose that means it's zaftig:-)
The keyboard hasn't changed in the 100 years and that is the main bottleneck. Vi is the most efficient keyboard interface to a text file I know of.
Emacs is nicer to use at first and is just as efficient for very simple and very complex edits but it's poorer in the middle. The trade off (both ways) is what gives the nice "community spirit".
The editors you mention don't even have the concept of complex edits and frequently require you to drag you hands away from the home keys, not just to the further reaches of the keyboard (like emacs) but right off the keyboard. This is the sort of thing that can break your concentration (ie WTF has happened to that ****ing mouse)
BTW: Regex S&R is one of the simplest of the "complex edits"
I like this one, after this every time you hit F1 vi will search for the next match and put it at the top of the screen.
Of course there are loads of others, some my faves...
the standard c2w or c2t[Space] with the second of those you have c; to almost do it again. how about d0 or c0 H and L are probably the least well known of the most useful movements.
Of course the ones that make people with lessor editors hate you are 15>> and 15<<
Sorry but the length of the second is now fixed. The costs of changing it would be astronomical, every scientific reference work, every reference to speed, every calculation in physics and engineering. The repercussions would reverberate for centuries.
Solar time is not so complex it needs an internet connection it's just 'simple' orbital mechanics after all.
Also it does have real advantages, especially your variant where the day starts at dawn (the normal day start is noon) because it matches with our biology.
Still to help people adjust I think dawn should be at (say) 6AM.
Likewise Microsoft aren't helping so they don't want it either; in fact they are actively hindering with their usual technique of making Silverlight a moving target.
I haven't bothered to look at the other answers but it's really simple.
It's best to allocate more swap than you think you will every be able to use.
Just because when you start to run out of physical memory the machine goes slower. When you run out of virtual memory (swap space) processes start getting killed.
With a modern disk on a 32bit machine I have had programs that use 3GB of virtual memory on a 512MB machine without a speed problem. So I would now say 4GB is the minimum. With a 64 bit machine you are limited by the SPEED of the disk so the problem is just how random the program is using memory. This is impossible to say as a general case so the twice memory rule is as good as any.
Of course this doesn't mean the OS needs swap, most will run fine without any but will benefit from a small area (say 128MB) to dump the data areas of programs that are started by never actually used.
He said what they want not what they currently have. DVDs only give them what they want if they stop working after 48 hours. I see their perfect world being where they sell, as middlemen, a music box for a 200% markup then every month thereafter get another chunk of cash. They don't have to pay anyone to carry the music, it comes out of the box and can't be heard by anyone except the named listener. They don't have to make any new music, the stuff from five years ago is just fine.
The "top ten" used to be a good way of getting near this, they had to recycle the old muzak into music to hide the 'covers' but it was good. Today it's not working so well, the internet has memory, it's easy to find the ten year old crap and compare it to one year old crap and see the file marks. Also internet and schoolyard file sharing is instant with no transaction cost, and your mother said it's good to share.
I never said copyright laws are intended to be an inheritance/retirement.
This was strongly implied by
And I would also love to be able to leave that income to my children when I pass.
Who are you to judge
One of your peers, you know the, twelve good men and true thing.
So what
Under the assumption that your works are good for society it's reasonable to also assume that another similar work would also be good. If the payment that we give you for a piece of work is so high that it stops you creating the new work this is a bad thing for society.
Losing the copyright after a "reasonable compensation" has been achieved would still fall with the encouragement of the arts that the grant of a copyright monopoly is supposed to give. But managing such a system and preventing corruption within it would be essentially impossible so that would not be what I'd suggest. This is why both the time limit and the provision of providing a copy of the work to specifically named libraries (at the time books) was in the original law.
The loss of a potential work because of overpayment is something that society has to accept because the alternatives are either unreasonable or unrealistic.
Back with your original question about how long copyrights on software as opposed to other works should last. Software is often a special case, because it's frequently done in the lines of "work for hire" so the person who does the work doesn't own the copyright grant. Because of the money driven nature of business I believe that the copyright grant on "work for hire" should be very short, just long enough to recover costs and some profit. The way that companies throw away old versions seems to say that something as short as three years is correct.
Of course nothing is that cut and dried and new versions are dependent on old versions and distinguishing "work for hire" and "work for art" is difficult. Also in reality three years would have people screaming "think of the children" and "our market is different".
So my feeling is "Registered Copyright." you get three years for free, after that it's treated more like a trademark, you must register it and renew it often (at a nominal fee) and provide copies to the state and citizens for a not unreasonable fee (ie high is ok, astronomical is not).
There, perpetual copyright, is that long enough for you?
How do I reconcile this? It's quite simple really, the registered owners are providing a service to society to preserve and make available this work, IMO this is worth the extension of the copyright grant. The nominal fee and copies rules try to ensure that it's not just an empty promise.
The copyright laws are supposed to be neither an inheritance nor a retirement fund. The claim is that they exist to encourage the artist to produce more works. If it were not for the little problem of evil bastards copyright would correctly expire when the artist does.
This is also why copyright should be short, if it's too long, like now, the artist loses any incentive to produce more works if the current is a hit.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, Successful Troll
Collateral damage is an essential part of a good incite-full troll.
I don't see this fitting with the viewers use-cases.
I see video uses of
The only one of these where I see a niche for this sort of video transfer is the live events section and the advantage is for the broadcaster not the viewer, in that the system keeps going if it gets oversubscribed.
Then even in the case where it might be useful it's not that good. The best solution would be a form of progressive download, where you get the low res chunks first (used in all cases) and then, if you have time before it gets shown, you add the high resolution details on top. That way the broadcaster's bandwidth to the caches is wasted.
This does tell me one thing though, WTH happened to my webcache. It was wiped out by hundreds of useless little video bits which clogged it up forcing out the useful stuff.
Thinking about it, this video service is probably best at providing a HD stream during the demo without actually having to buy the bandwidth to provide a HD stream during an actual live event ...
you start booting bottom.
No that should be Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus, Zathrus and Zathrus.
Oops, sorry, Zathrus isn't there any more.
It's easy to get bits across a border, just make sure you wipe the disk with a secure wiper (dumps randomness on the disk) and reimage it.
Or that's what you say, for all you know the sysadmin guy put five checksummed mirrors under the randomness, say four and a half left now that the machine has been imaged. Maybe that's the reason he gave you a nice 500Gb drive. He doesn't have to worry about you booting it or using it a bit, he just has to make sure it goes wrong when you get back home ...
Of course re-imaging is the most reasonable thing in the world to do if the border patrols are known to be ... erm ... aggressive.
One thing I would suggest is to try to have a robust infrastructure. By that I mean don't depend on the integrity of the software on the PCs or require a specific OS. Locking down a PC works for a while or when you get fired if you break it, but that ain't gonna happen.
The way I would arrange things is to make every PC boot off the network, download a small OS that can image the first partition of the disk from one of a collection of images also stored on the local disk. These images would be checksummed (sha) against images on a central file server.
This way you don't care much if somebody trashes the PCs or needs special versions of Windows/Linux/BSD/LTSP/BYOOS as a reimage will normally take 30 seconds to a minute. Train the teachers how to do this.
You'll probably still want to password the BIOS, but that's a lot easier and less intrusive than trying to lock down Windows without breaking somebodies must have application. You may also want to have a multicast or p2p method of updating the on-disk caches for when you do a big OS upgrade (maybe for monday mornings too).
What you're doing is to try and make sure that anything the little ... darlings ... do doesn't impact you; but you don't need to go past the point where everybody sees them for the shits they are! (okay, okay, some of them are! Better now?)
Exactly, so there's NO FUCKING WAY you are going to go into BB and buy Vista Basic Retail Version.
BTW: You're not happy about it either, you don't want to buy a new OS, you want FREEwindows or FREElinux or FREEdos
This is what makes zero current standby possible.
You take a very large capacity 5V capacitor and use it to power the 'on standby' electronics. The only job of these electronics is to monitor the wakeup sources, for a TV it's the IR receiver, for a PC it would be the 'standby button', the 'Wake on LAN' and probably a timer. The rest of the TV is turned off, the rest of the PC is put into hibernation, it works and then there's no reason to power an unknown number of gigabytes of high performance RAM.
Why do you do this ...
If a switch mode supply is providing any current it has to draw a lot of power from the mains, for very low currents (like when in standby) over 99% of the power drawn by the PSU is wasted as heat in the PSU. OTOH if you take no power from the PSU you can turn it off (in fact modern ones sometimes turn themselves off). Even if you have to 'wakeup' the PSU every day or two to recharge the capacitor there is a considerable saving. But for simple electronics (an IR receiver, a CMOS clock, a 10-Base-T receiver) the capacitor can probably keep things going for weeks or months on it's own.
BTW: If you PC doesn't need to wake on lan or similar you can USE HIBERNATION NOW!
>> No I don't know why that isn't the default by now either...
Because windows runs out of space for it's paging tables and other system data if the amount of physical RAM is more that about 16GB (maybe 12GB if the PCI address space is large) and the /3G flag is on. Plus before it hits a hard limit it's DMA buffers are reduced, these are buffers for devices that cannot DMA to an address above 4GB. This may impact performance for cheaper devices.
Of course some drivers can't cope with /3G but these are rather rare nowadays.
If you consider the "REAL" memory to be that stuff that's normally labeled "cache".
Example this Athlon 64 had 1MB of physical memory on the CPU divided into "pages" of 8 bytes. If your working set is less than a megabyte you will be running entirely from this memory and running very very fast.
As soon as you start 'paging out' to the so called "main memory" your performance takes a dive.
The only differences between this and the level normally mentioned are speed, size and the fact that this level is usually controlled completely by the hardware.
The rule really simple, if you can't drop everything and have sex because of work then you're on working time.
So it includes being in the car or on the train, it doesn't include your morning shower though!
If the employer feels that this point in time isn't in your per hour rate all that means is that it's dropping their hourly rate to below the Mc'D down the road. You know what to do.
Of course the problem is some people don't know what to do, or don't think they can do it.
BTW: If you get home and are too tired that time should probably be included too! OTOH TIPS should NOT be included, they aren't paid by the employer after all.
You mean vim or gvim?
Personally I think the gvim GUI is fine; those tear off menus are sweet.
My only real problem with vim is that sometimes it seems a little overweight but I can never point to something I think should go ... I suppose that means it's zaftig :-)
Why does everyone seem to use :wq instead of :x ?!
The keyboard hasn't changed in the 100 years and that is the main bottleneck. Vi is the most efficient keyboard interface to a text file I know of.
Emacs is nicer to use at first and is just as efficient for very simple and very complex edits but it's poorer in the middle. The trade off (both ways) is what gives the nice "community spirit".
The editors you mention don't even have the concept of complex edits and frequently require you to drag you hands away from the home keys, not just to the further reaches of the keyboard (like emacs) but right off the keyboard. This is the sort of thing that can break your concentration (ie WTF has happened to that ****ing mouse)
BTW: Regex S&R is one of the simplest of the "complex edits"
:map [Ctrl-V][F1] /[Ctrl-V][Ctrl-M]z[Ctrl-V][Ctrl-M]$
I like this one, after this every time you hit F1 vi will search for the next match and put it at the top of the screen.
Of course there are loads of others, some my faves ...
the standard c2w or c2t[Space]
with the second of those you have c; to almost do it again.
how about d0 or c0
H and L are probably the least well known of the most useful movements.
Of course the ones that make people with lessor editors hate you are 15>> and 15<<
>> DECIMAL TIME
Sorry but the length of the second is now fixed. The costs of changing it would be astronomical, every scientific reference work, every reference to speed, every calculation in physics and engineering. The repercussions would reverberate for centuries.
Solar time is not so complex it needs an internet connection it's just 'simple' orbital mechanics after all.
Also it does have real advantages, especially your variant where the day starts at dawn (the normal day start is noon) because it matches with our biology.
Still to help people adjust I think dawn should be at (say) 6AM.
And I don't want it, so I won't.
Likewise Microsoft aren't helping so they don't want it either; in fact they are actively hindering with their usual technique of making Silverlight a moving target.
I haven't bothered to look at the other answers but it's really simple.
It's best to allocate more swap than you think you will every be able to use.
Just because when you start to run out of physical memory the machine goes slower. When you run out of virtual memory (swap space) processes start getting killed.
With a modern disk on a 32bit machine I have had programs that use 3GB of virtual memory on a 512MB machine without a speed problem. So I would now say 4GB is the minimum. With a 64 bit machine you are limited by the SPEED of the disk so the problem is just how random the program is using memory. This is impossible to say as a general case so the twice memory rule is as good as any.
Of course this doesn't mean the OS needs swap, most will run fine without any but will benefit from a small area (say 128MB) to dump the data areas of programs that are started by never actually used.
Any takers ... someone ? ... anyone ?
>> We need to do enough research to make sure it won't cause a hurricane / tsunami first
> You don't actually know what a tsunami is, do you?
Hey, it could happen. Those clouds can get pretty big! If one of them were to fall.... ;-)
Yes, It would piss down all over you.
No, you failed reading comprehension.
He said what they want not what they currently have. DVDs only give them what they want if they stop working after 48 hours. I see their perfect world being where they sell, as middlemen, a music box for a 200% markup then every month thereafter get another chunk of cash. They don't have to pay anyone to carry the music, it comes out of the box and can't be heard by anyone except the named listener. They don't have to make any new music, the stuff from five years ago is just fine.
The "top ten" used to be a good way of getting near this, they had to recycle the old muzak into music to hide the 'covers' but it was good. Today it's not working so well, the internet has memory, it's easy to find the ten year old crap and compare it to one year old crap and see the file marks. Also internet and schoolyard file sharing is instant with no transaction cost, and your mother said it's good to share.
I never said copyright laws are intended to be an inheritance/retirement.
This was strongly implied by
And I would also love to be able to leave that income to my children when I pass.
Who are you to judge
One of your peers, you know the, twelve good men and true thing.
So what
Under the assumption that your works are good for society it's reasonable to also assume that another similar work would also be good. If the payment that we give you for a piece of work is so high that it stops you creating the new work this is a bad thing for society.
Losing the copyright after a "reasonable compensation" has been achieved would still fall with the encouragement of the arts that the grant of a copyright monopoly is supposed to give. But managing such a system and preventing corruption within it would be essentially impossible so that would not be what I'd suggest. This is why both the time limit and the provision of providing a copy of the work to specifically named libraries (at the time books) was in the original law. The loss of a potential work because of overpayment is something that society has to accept because the alternatives are either unreasonable or unrealistic.
Back with your original question about how long copyrights on software as opposed to other works should last. Software is often a special case, because it's frequently done in the lines of "work for hire" so the person who does the work doesn't own the copyright grant. Because of the money driven nature of business I believe that the copyright grant on "work for hire" should be very short, just long enough to recover costs and some profit. The way that companies throw away old versions seems to say that something as short as three years is correct.
Of course nothing is that cut and dried and new versions are dependent on old versions and distinguishing "work for hire" and "work for art" is difficult. Also in reality three years would have people screaming "think of the children" and "our market is different".
So my feeling is "Registered Copyright." you get three years for free, after that it's treated more like a trademark, you must register it and renew it often (at a nominal fee) and provide copies to the state and citizens for a not unreasonable fee (ie high is ok, astronomical is not).
There, perpetual copyright, is that long enough for you?
How do I reconcile this? It's quite simple really, the registered owners are providing a service to society to preserve and make available this work, IMO this is worth the extension of the copyright grant. The nominal fee and copies rules try to ensure that it's not just an empty promise.
The copyright laws are supposed to be neither an inheritance nor a retirement fund. The claim is that they exist to encourage the artist to produce more works. If it were not for the little problem of evil bastards copyright would correctly expire when the artist does.
This is also why copyright should be short, if it's too long, like now, the artist loses any incentive to produce more works if the current is a hit.
The same barrier exists at 2TB or 2^32 disk sectors.
After that MSDOS style partition tables aren't good enough any more.