The DMCA doesn't apply, not because of your twisted theory, but because the streams are not encrypted. TiVo 2.0 stores programs in cleartext. All this new software does is open up the proprietary filesystem format. It's not that big a deal.
And as someone else mentioned, there are other legal mallets that can be used besides the DMCA.
Yes, we need the number. Not only are the specific claims relevant, but the application date is key to finding prior art that will defeat it.
However ther really isn't much doubt it's bogus.
My own
thumbnail index generator
has a copyright date of 1995. eBay wasn't
founded until September of that year, and didn't
do thumbnails until much later. In fact, their
CTO Michael Wilson actually asked me to program their thumbnail
code, based on my version, but I was too busy. I might still have the
email to document this.
The vintage ads I'd really like to find are the
various animals made from electronics components, done by Honeywell back in the mid 1970s. The frog was my favorite. I wrote to Honeywell's PR department recently but they had never heard of these ads.
I misinterpreted that slide the same way at first. It's not like the preceeding ones, it shows elapsed time instead of ops/sec, so Solaris's high number means really bad performance.
As for the bulk sales, though, it doesn't look like a very good deal. Assuming the 10% discount I get:
100 2x2 bricks for $6.29 = 6.3 cents/brick
50 2x4 bricks for $6.29 = 12.6 cents/brick
Plus shipping - $2.50-$10.
Compare to Tyco Superblocks, an excellent quality Lego-compatible brick, which were recently on sale at Toys R Us for $10 / 900 bricks = 1.1 cents/brick.
Furthermore eBay usually has plenty of auctions for bulk Lego-brand bricks, in single colors, for less that Lego wants. E.g. 500 assorted black bricks for $10 = 2 cents/brick.
I've ordered parts from Lego when I needed specific rare pieces, but for bulk bricks this is not a good deal.
I've got a similar cluster with a somewhat different focus - I need to be able to generate enough HTTP client traffic to saturate (well, nearly saturate) a single gigabit ethernet server. The clients in my system are eight eTower 266s that I got on clearance at buy.com for $229 each. These have 200MHz Cyrix M-II CPUs, and running FreeBSD that's enough horsepower to saturate a 100baseT ethernet, so eight can pretty much saturate the gig ether.
However, if the client machines were running Linux, they would not be able to saturate, since Linux still has about half the networking performance of FreeBSD. That's the main reason I run FreeBSD and not Linux. Other reasons include Linux's tremendous supply of bugs that were fixed in BSD years ago, and the general obnoxiousness of the Linux and Gnu user community.
To avoid security holes in shell scripts the main trick is to always put argument expansions inside double quotes. Doing this would fix the abovementioned reverse-DNS hack, among others.
Blocking the.. snooping would also be pretty easy - just add a little switch statement.
Along the same lines as these servers, here's my web server in 150 lines of C. It's more featureful than these - it does index.html, and even directory listings.
Actually very few web sites have traffic greater than 100 Mbps. Work it out. Based on a week's data from my own site, www.acme.com, which has a typical mix of text, images, and downloads, the average fetch size is 10KB. A 100baseT card can serve 1100 of those per second, or about 100,000,000/day. The number of sites that do more than a hundred million hits per day can be counted on two hands.
And yes, a plain old pee cee can easily serve those 1100 hits/second and saturate a 100baseT card. My old 200MHz Pentium Pro does it quite easily, with CPU cycles to spare. Of course, it runs thttpd and FreeBSD 3, not Apache and Linux. According to my measurements, running Linux would slow it down by a factor of two, and Apache would slow it down by a factor of five. Running both, with a factor of ten less performance, my old machine would indeed not be able to saturate its network card. No doubt this is where people got the idea that they needed multiple machines to serve mid-sized web sites - when they run inefficient software, they are right!
Professor Lederman, a few years ago I remember talk of some new ideas for particle accelerators. Supposedly they would let us build teravolt accelerators that fit on a desktop. Two names that stuck in my mind were "wake field" and "plasma beat wave". Has anything come of these ideas? If they do become feasible, do you think we might already have built the last of the giant accelerators? What would the role of the national accelerator labs be in that case?
Mass scribbling on the WELL is a peculiar institution. It started years ago when Bandy and his then wife Booter were being harassed by one of the WELL's mad dogs. Bandy wrote a somewhat baroque C program to find all their posts, emit scribble commands, and execute them. Then they made an unexpected discovery - due to a bug in the conferencing software, each topic where they had scribbled a post would show up as "new" for all readers, even though there were no actual new responses. That morning, every reader in every conference was having to hit return hundreds of times to make their way through a whole lot of nothing. There was an outcry, of course. I believe that the WELL's prejudice against mass scribbling is really due to this stupid bug, not to any lofty considerations of conversational integrity. Blair Newman's mass scribble followed shortly after Bandy and Booter's. I'm pretty sure he did it just for fun, to try out a new techno toy, and it was not related to his suicide a few weeks later. However, those who were still pissed at Bandy & Booter naturally seized upon the suicide as an opportunity to paint mass scribbling as evil or something. The WELL is like that sometimes. The peculiar thing was that in order to make this rhetorical connection, Blair had to be retroactively sanctified. So, a lot of the folks who harassed him while he was alive - including the same person who was harassing Bandy and Booter - were now praising Blair. Very strange to see. In the years since then, the original motive - protection from a harasser - has been the most common reason for mass scribbling. Jim's use for pre-emptive political protection is a first. By the way, Jim didn't use Bandy's original mass scribble program, he used a later simpler shell script written by me.
Slashdot Mirror
HP2000 BASIC actually.
And as someone else mentioned, there are other legal mallets that can be used besides the DMCA.
Yes, we need the number. Not only are the specific claims relevant, but the application date is key to finding prior art that will defeat it. However ther really isn't much doubt it's bogus.
My own thumbnail index generator has a copyright date of 1995. eBay wasn't founded until September of that year, and didn't do thumbnails until much later. In fact, their CTO Michael Wilson actually asked me to program their thumbnail code, based on my version, but I was too busy. I might still have the email to document this.
The vintage ads I'd really like to find are the various animals made from electronics components, done by Honeywell back in the mid 1970s. The frog was my favorite. I wrote to Honeywell's PR department recently but they had never heard of these ads.
I have MP3s of the Science Songs albums on my web page.
Signed, Fucking Wanker.
...are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Is it possible that Mark didn't get hired because he's an obnoxious dickwad?
I misinterpreted that slide the same way at first. It's not like the preceeding ones, it shows elapsed time instead of ops/sec, so Solaris's high number means really bad performance.
NFS server writing:
http serving:
Postgresql:
Parallel computing (task switching):
Solaris:
Pretty devastating stuff. Nothing I haven't been saying for years though.
As for the bulk sales, though, it doesn't look like a very good deal. Assuming the 10% discount I get:
- 100 2x2 bricks for $6.29 = 6.3 cents/brick
- 50 2x4 bricks for $6.29 = 12.6 cents/brick
Plus shipping - $2.50-$10.Compare to Tyco Superblocks, an excellent quality Lego-compatible brick, which were recently on sale at Toys R Us for $10 / 900 bricks = 1.1 cents/brick.
Furthermore eBay usually has plenty of auctions for bulk Lego-brand bricks, in single colors, for less that Lego wants. E.g. 500 assorted black bricks for $10 = 2 cents/brick.
I've ordered parts from Lego when I needed specific rare pieces, but for bulk bricks this is not a good deal.
I've got a similar cluster with a somewhat different focus - I need to be able to generate enough HTTP client traffic to saturate (well, nearly saturate) a single gigabit ethernet server. The clients in my system are eight eTower 266s that I got on clearance at buy.com for $229 each. These have 200MHz Cyrix M-II CPUs, and running FreeBSD that's enough horsepower to saturate a 100baseT ethernet, so eight can pretty much saturate the gig ether.
However, if the client machines were running Linux, they would not be able to saturate, since Linux still has about half the networking performance of FreeBSD. That's the main reason I run FreeBSD and not Linux. Other reasons include Linux's tremendous supply of bugs that were fixed in BSD years ago, and the general obnoxiousness of the Linux and Gnu user community.
If not for those things, sure, I'd run Linux.
The experiments dress it up to make it look like something more interesting is going on, but really that's all it is. Math here. Animation here.
Yeah, I got that "Mac users" message too, on my Solaris 2.6 system. Idiots.
Why don't you try it and report back to the class?
To avoid security holes in shell scripts the main trick is to always put argument expansions inside double quotes. Doing this would fix the abovementioned reverse-DNS hack, among others.
Blocking the .. snooping would also be pretty easy - just add a little switch statement.
Along the same lines as these servers, here's my web server in 150 lines of C. It's more featureful than these - it does index.html, and even directory listings.
Mainly, it needs an ethernet port.
And yes, a plain old pee cee can easily serve those 1100 hits/second and saturate a 100baseT card. My old 200MHz Pentium Pro does it quite easily, with CPU cycles to spare. Of course, it runs thttpd and FreeBSD 3, not Apache and Linux. According to my measurements, running Linux would slow it down by a factor of two, and Apache would slow it down by a factor of five. Running both, with a factor of ten less performance, my old machine would indeed not be able to saturate its network card. No doubt this is where people got the idea that they needed multiple machines to serve mid-sized web sites - when they run inefficient software, they are right!
Professor Lederman, a few years ago I remember talk of some new ideas for particle accelerators. Supposedly they would let us build teravolt accelerators that fit on a desktop. Two names that stuck in my mind were "wake field" and "plasma beat wave". Has anything come of these ideas? If they do become feasible, do you think we might already have built the last of the giant accelerators? What would the role of the national accelerator labs be in that case?
But the BSD license is better.
Mass scribbling on the WELL is a peculiar institution. It started years ago when Bandy and his then wife Booter were being harassed by one of the WELL's mad dogs. Bandy wrote a somewhat baroque C program to find all their posts, emit scribble commands, and execute them. Then they made an unexpected discovery - due to a bug in the conferencing software, each topic where they had scribbled a post would show up as "new" for all readers, even though there were no actual new responses. That morning, every reader in every conference was having to hit return hundreds of times to make their way through a whole lot of nothing. There was an outcry, of course. I believe that the WELL's prejudice against mass scribbling is really due to this stupid bug, not to any lofty considerations of conversational integrity. Blair Newman's mass scribble followed shortly after Bandy and Booter's. I'm pretty sure he did it just for fun, to try out a new techno toy, and it was not related to his suicide a few weeks later. However, those who were still pissed at Bandy & Booter naturally seized upon the suicide as an opportunity to paint mass scribbling as evil or something. The WELL is like that sometimes. The peculiar thing was that in order to make this rhetorical connection, Blair had to be retroactively sanctified. So, a lot of the folks who harassed him while he was alive - including the same person who was harassing Bandy and Booter - were now praising Blair. Very strange to see. In the years since then, the original motive - protection from a harasser - has been the most common reason for mass scribbling. Jim's use for pre-emptive political protection is a first. By the way, Jim didn't use Bandy's original mass scribble program, he used a later simpler shell script written by me.