I actually happen to like this idea if it done properly. I own a Tivo, and I find it does a pretty good job of picking shows to record that I might like.. and if I don't I just give it's selection a thumbs down on the remote, and it will gradually get better.
So if Tivo the company can use the same intelligence to send me comercials that it uses to record me shows, perhaps I might actually watch them. Everyone seems to forget that advertising is not the devil incarnate. If company X is having 60 gig hard drives on sale for $100, you bet I wouldn't mind if they told me. Too many companies advertise fluff that I have absolutly no interest in that I'm just in the habit of fast forwarding through every commercial by now though, but that could change if they could send me commercials that concern products I am interested in.
Of course the one thing that does concern me is that they would link my preferences to my name, but Tivo has said they don't do that numerous times.. of course they might be doing it anyway without telling us, but that kind of info has a way of getting out eventually, and then look out lawsuits.
just my 2 cents:)
No, I feel your kind of missing the point with your example. Lets say I develop an awsome web application such as a top flight accounting package. Now I release it under the GPL and some ASP vendor grabs it and makes tons of improvements, and then starts charging businesses $500 a month to use it. As I (and others) read the GPL, the ASP vendor would be under no obligation to release their code, although I strongly feel the spirit of the GPL should require them to.
First let me say that I really doubt Kevin will get those files back. He is already convicted, therefore as I understand the law, the presumtion of innocence does not really apply.
So I can just see it, in 10 years or so, computers will be so powerfull that some pseudo journalist like Geraldo will brute force the encryption and then everone will be staring at a bunch of his grandma's recipies or something.
And only One watt of power use. They said that your laptop should be able to run all day without a recharge. Of course this is marketing speak, I'll believe it when I see it. But still this is what it's going to take to get the mobile market to take off. I absolutly HATE it when my laptop goes dead halfway through something.
This is an idea I've been mulling over in my brain for about a year or so, and am not sure if it's practical, but thought I would share it so I can get feedback on what my idea of an ideal webhosting company should be.
I also have been down the road of hosting with different companies and none of them have ever lived up to my expectations. Now I am the webmaster/head developer/server admin for a rather large commercial site (who shall remain nameless at this point) and have developed several internet applications such as a shopping cart, auction, forums and so on.
I think the ideal webhosting company would set the price per month based only on the amount of traffic your site recieves. The way I look at it, disk space and server cpu space is relativly cheap, but it's the bandwith that costs. Most hosting companies therefore actually don't want your site to succeed, becouse then you use more traffic, costing them money.
I want a webhosting company to do what I believe to be the right thing, and do everything possible to allow their customers sites to succeed by giving them the same tools that everyone else has, such as the aformentioned programs. By charging based on bandwidth used both the customer and the hosting company would be winners whenever an hosted site takes off.
I would also release all the code that makes up the site under an opensource license, so that it could enjoy the advantages of per review. I am a big fan of the GPL, however I am leery of releasing the code under it at this point, becouse what would happen if one of the other large webhosting companies uses it, under the GPL they would be under no obligations to return it back to me, as they wouldn't be redistributing it, they would just be using it internally. So a license with restrictions to prevent that from happing would be perfect. I wouldn't care if they used it so much, as long as they were required to submit thier changes back.
I am not a lawyer so I wouldn't know how to set this up, but I would also like the company to function as a cooperative, so members could vote on different issues, such as what new feature we should implement or what is more important, a new mail server of a new database server.
Ok, you say, so why haven't I done this already? Two reasons. One I don't have the funds to keep the T1s running for more than a few months. And two I am not quite ready to quit my job and embark on this 'crazy venture' as my signifigant other terms it.. I do have most of the programs written however, so someday you may see this idea become a reality.
So tell me what you all think. You can email me at nathan@stitt.org
Please explain to me how a hidden proxy server would work.
I don't have a clue how @hoome does it, but a hidden proxy server is very easy to do. I've set them up using squid and Linux port forwarding. All you have to do is set your gateway to forward port 80 (or what ever port you want) to the proxy server port. That way all all traffic will hit the proxy.
IMHO this is a good thing, as a proxy means that rather than going over the internet to pull down static content, ie: the images on a web page for instance, it will all come out of the cache. Of course if whoever is running the proxy gets too thrifty you run into things like reading yesterdays slashdot page instead of the current version.
Actually I've been toying with something simular for the site I work at. I'm thinking I'll encrypted the cc info with gnu pgp once they submit it.. then store it on the harddrive. Once a day or so a person clears the orders out by submitting thier pgp signature / password.
Using this method, I don't see how any one would be able to do anything to the info, even if they did crack the server.
Of course if the crackers were smart enough they would modify the checout scrips to save the info in a different location unencrypted. This could possible go undetected for awhile if they were smart enough.
Still this method should be secure enough to stop the crackers from just downloading the credit card info table from mysql.
I agree totally. This Cristmas me and my wife bought pokemon for our 5 year old son's gameboy. He really couldn't get into it too much, becouse it's a little advanced for his age I think. But the wife loves it! she's played it for at least two weeks straight already.
I looked at the game briefly before she snagged it, and it really reminds me of the old dungeon and dragons type of games, with a touch of zork thrown in.
Needless to say as soon as she gets done, i've got dibs on it.
You can use usernames and passwords over NNTP as well. My suggestion would be to hack the NNTP server's authenication to use the MySQL database and allow anyone to read the articles, but to have an account in order to post.
You really should look into going to some Military Surplus sales (that is if you are in the US). When I was in the Military we had some old field computers called YUK's. Which is an acronym for something or the other. They were just 386 and 486 at the time but damn were they sturdy. If you could get your hands on one of them you could try to replace the mother board and CPU with a faster one and go from there. They are very distinctive computeres, they are all green and come in cases about 3 feet square. The case opens up and the computer sits inside with about a foot of padding on all sides.
Why is the casino liable in your eyes? They don't know they guy.. They have never seen him face to face.. for all they knew they guy was a Donald Trump and the 25K is pocket change. Nor do I feel the credit card company is at fault here. All they did is extend him credit.. which was to be used at his descetion. This is the same as the debate over wether ISP's are liable for the use of the bandwidth they sell to people. Some use the bandwidth for research or whatnot, others use it for Kiddie Porn.. however the ISP isn't responsible. Likewise Credit card companies are not responsible for how the credit they give to people is used.
if you distribute a tool that is designed to circumvent copy protection then you are liable
This to me does not make sense.. what about all those websites out there that distribute cracks to shareware and commercial programs? Under your definition they are also liable even though they have all those cute disclamers stating that the cracks are only to be used for archiving software that you have a legal copy of. Many of these sites are rather permanent and have been up for quite a while.. if they were illegal, I would think that someone would have taken the operators to court a long time ago.
I am not a lawyer either, however the intent seems to be the important part of the law. It's clear that Derek did not do this in order to make illegal copies of DVDs. He did it so that he could play DVD on the operating system of his choice. This definatly should not be a crime, however I am the first to admit that the US (and apareantly the UK) legal system is screwed up enough that it might be.
Having finally finished reading the findings of fact.. that is the first thing that comes to my mind. For years I have been wondering about different things like 'why the heck did intuit stop using netscape' and 'why did Apple make IE their only browser'.. Now it's all clear.. There are so many back room deals detailed in this thing it is downright scary. This should be required reading for all programmers that want to tie themselves to the Windows APIs. And for all Managers who still believe that Microsoft is the 'One True Way' Reading other peoples comments here I'm reminded of what idiots some people can be.. it's pretty obious that most people didn't even bother to read the thing. After reading this I'm reminded of how insecure Microsoft is in their own products. They are frightened to death that Windows can't compete on it's own merits.. therefore they make all kinds of slimy deals to eliminate possible competition. If I was a Microsoft shareholder I would be thinking of sueing them right now.. there is no telling how much $$ Microsoft has pissed away on their struggles against other products that weren't really competitors. Just think.. not only did Microsoft spend around a 150 million dollars to develop a (better IMHO) browser than Netscape and give it away.. they also wasted opurtunities to probly make at least 5 times that much by giving goodies to companies to use and promote it. Then they were so insecure, they even spent more money and gave more goodies away to get big websites to use HTML to break Netscape. (I wonder how zdnet and Disney feel after reading this). All this money spent and oppurtunites passed up for no apparent reason.. what will they gain? Nothing. All Microsoft has done is alienated the companies they need the most. Do you think Compaq would be supporting Linux if they hadn't been raked over the coals by Microsoft so hard? I don't. What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve.
Ok first let me say that I have put a mirror up here as well. I probly won't be able to leave it up to long.. but hopefully long enough for others to mirror it as well.. hint.. hint.
What I feel should be done to microsoft at this point is nothing. Now that the judge has ruled that they are indeed a monopoly (not there was ever much doubt of that in our minds) all the people that used to be Microsofts best customers.. the PHB's of the world, have to set up and take notice of the fact that they have placed thier entire business in the hands of a monopoly.
If the has to be some kind of remedy imposed I would argue in favor of breaking them up like the baby bells. This is the only solution I can see that would really restrain them in the future.
Don't forget to look into Sybase.. I've had great luck using it for our website. It's not quite as fast as MySQL but it more than makes up for it by supporting transaction IMHO. Plus it's a free (unsupported) download from Redhat and I think a few other Distro's websites.
There are some rights that law does not allow us to consent to give away. For example, you are not allowed to sign your freedom away to become an indentured servant, at any price.
You are right to a point.. but ever heard of something called the U.S. (and other countries as well I'm sure) Military.. I've often wondered how the goverment gets around this one.
I somewhat disagree with this thread.. Yes I have had my X-sessions crash before.. so I lost my work.. But everyone else in my home network did not, as all the Daemons were still running. Everyone was still on the Internet, Samba was still pushing files, and all that. So I was the only one affected. Maybe that count's as a half a crash..... But at work if the NT Server crashes the whole damn office is screaming bloody murder.. and of course I don't even dare to use it as a workstation, like I do my home server. The point I'm making is that Linux (and unix in general) is better becouse it is modular.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually happen to like this idea if it done properly. I own a Tivo, and I find it does a pretty good job of picking shows to record that I might like.. and if I don't I just give it's selection a thumbs down on the remote, and it will gradually get better. So if Tivo the company can use the same intelligence to send me comercials that it uses to record me shows, perhaps I might actually watch them. Everyone seems to forget that advertising is not the devil incarnate. If company X is having 60 gig hard drives on sale for $100, you bet I wouldn't mind if they told me. Too many companies advertise fluff that I have absolutly no interest in that I'm just in the habit of fast forwarding through every commercial by now though, but that could change if they could send me commercials that concern products I am interested in. Of course the one thing that does concern me is that they would link my preferences to my name, but Tivo has said they don't do that numerous times.. of course they might be doing it anyway without telling us, but that kind of info has a way of getting out eventually, and then look out lawsuits. just my 2 cents :)
No, I feel your kind of missing the point with your example. Lets say I develop an awsome web application such as a top flight accounting package. Now I release it under the GPL and some ASP vendor grabs it and makes tons of improvements, and then starts charging businesses $500 a month to use it. As I (and others) read the GPL, the ASP vendor would be under no obligation to release their code, although I strongly feel the spirit of the GPL should require them to.
So I can just see it, in 10 years or so, computers will be so powerfull that some pseudo journalist like Geraldo will brute force the encryption and then everone will be staring at a bunch of his grandma's recipies or something.
Or maybe not.. who knows?
And only One watt of power use. They said that your laptop should be able to run all day without a recharge. Of course this is marketing speak, I'll believe it when I see it. But still this is what it's going to take to get the mobile market to take off. I absolutly HATE it when my laptop goes dead halfway through something.
I also have been down the road of hosting with different companies and none of them have ever lived up to my expectations. Now I am the webmaster/head developer/server admin for a rather large commercial site (who shall remain nameless at this point) and have developed several internet applications such as a shopping cart, auction, forums and so on.
I think the ideal webhosting company would set the price per month based only on the amount of traffic your site recieves. The way I look at it, disk space and server cpu space is relativly cheap, but it's the bandwith that costs. Most hosting companies therefore actually don't want your site to succeed, becouse then you use more traffic, costing them money.
I want a webhosting company to do what I believe to be the right thing, and do everything possible to allow their customers sites to succeed by giving them the same tools that everyone else has, such as the aformentioned programs. By charging based on bandwidth used both the customer and the hosting company would be winners whenever an hosted site takes off.
I would also release all the code that makes up the site under an opensource license, so that it could enjoy the advantages of per review. I am a big fan of the GPL, however I am leery of releasing the code under it at this point, becouse what would happen if one of the other large webhosting companies uses it, under the GPL they would be under no obligations to return it back to me, as they wouldn't be redistributing it, they would just be using it internally. So a license with restrictions to prevent that from happing would be perfect. I wouldn't care if they used it so much, as long as they were required to submit thier changes back.
I am not a lawyer so I wouldn't know how to set this up, but I would also like the company to function as a cooperative, so members could vote on different issues, such as what new feature we should implement or what is more important, a new mail server of a new database server.
Ok, you say, so why haven't I done this already? Two reasons. One I don't have the funds to keep the T1s running for more than a few months. And two I am not quite ready to quit my job and embark on this 'crazy venture' as my signifigant other terms it.. I do have most of the programs written however, so someday you may see this idea become a reality.
So tell me what you all think. You can email me at nathan@stitt.org
I don't have a clue how @hoome does it, but a hidden proxy server is very easy to do. I've set them up using squid and Linux port forwarding. All you have to do is set your gateway to forward port 80 (or what ever port you want) to the proxy server port. That way all all traffic will hit the proxy.
IMHO this is a good thing, as a proxy means that rather than going over the internet to pull down static content, ie: the images on a web page for instance, it will all come out of the cache. Of course if whoever is running the proxy gets too thrifty you run into things like reading yesterdays slashdot page instead of the current version.
Using this method, I don't see how any one would be able to do anything to the info, even if they did crack the server.
Of course if the crackers were smart enough they would modify the checout scrips to save the info in a different location unencrypted. This could possible go undetected for awhile if they were smart enough.
Still this method should be secure enough to stop the crackers from just downloading the credit card info table from mysql.
I looked at the game briefly before she snagged it, and it really reminds me of the old dungeon and dragons type of games, with a touch of zork thrown in.
Needless to say as soon as she gets done, i've got dibs on it.
You can use usernames and passwords over NNTP as well. My suggestion would be to hack the NNTP server's authenication to use the MySQL database and allow anyone to read the articles, but to have an account in order to post.
You really should look into going to some Military Surplus sales (that is if you are in the US). When I was in the Military we had some old field computers called YUK's. Which is an acronym for something or the other. They were just 386 and 486 at the time but damn were they sturdy. If you could get your hands on one of them you could try to replace the mother board and CPU with a faster one and go from there. They are very distinctive computeres, they are all green and come in cases about 3 feet square. The case opens up and the computer sits inside with about a foot of padding on all sides.
Why is the casino liable in your eyes? They don't know they guy.. They have never seen him face to face.. for all they knew they guy was a Donald Trump and the 25K is pocket change. Nor do I feel the credit card company is at fault here. All they did is extend him credit.. which was to be used at his descetion. This is the same as the debate over wether ISP's are liable for the use of the bandwidth they sell to people. Some use the bandwidth for research or whatnot, others use it for Kiddie Porn.. however the ISP isn't responsible. Likewise Credit card companies are not responsible for how the credit they give to people is used.
if you distribute a tool that is designed to circumvent copy protection then you are liable
This to me does not make sense.. what about all those websites out there that distribute cracks to shareware and commercial programs? Under your definition they are also liable even though they have all those cute disclamers stating that the cracks are only to be used for archiving software that you have a legal copy of. Many of these sites are rather permanent and have been up for quite a while.. if they were illegal, I would think that someone would have taken the operators to court a long time ago.
I am not a lawyer either, however the intent seems to be the important part of the law. It's clear that Derek did not do this in order to make illegal copies of DVDs. He did it so that he could play DVD on the operating system of his choice. This definatly should not be a crime, however I am the first to admit that the US (and apareantly the UK) legal system is screwed up enough that it might be.
Having finally finished reading the findings of fact.. that is the first thing that comes to my mind. For years I have been wondering about different things like 'why the heck did intuit stop using netscape' and 'why did Apple make IE their only browser'.. Now it's all clear.. There are so many back room deals detailed in this thing it is downright scary.
This should be required reading for all programmers that want to tie themselves to the Windows APIs. And for all Managers who still believe that Microsoft is the 'One True Way'
Reading other peoples comments here I'm reminded of what idiots some people can be.. it's pretty obious that most people didn't even bother to read the thing.
After reading this I'm reminded of how insecure Microsoft is in their own products. They are frightened to death that Windows can't compete on it's own merits.. therefore they make all kinds of slimy deals to eliminate possible competition.
If I was a Microsoft shareholder I would be thinking of sueing them right now.. there is no telling how much $$ Microsoft has pissed away on their struggles against other products that weren't really competitors. Just think.. not only did Microsoft spend around a 150 million dollars to develop a (better IMHO) browser than Netscape and give it away.. they also wasted opurtunities to probly make at least 5 times that much by giving goodies to companies to use and promote it. Then they were so insecure, they even spent more money and gave more goodies away to get big websites to use HTML to break Netscape. (I wonder how zdnet and Disney feel after reading this).
All this money spent and oppurtunites passed up for no apparent reason.. what will they gain? Nothing. All Microsoft has done is alienated the companies they need the most. Do you think Compaq would be supporting Linux if they hadn't been raked over the coals by Microsoft so hard? I don't.
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve.
Ok first let me say that I have put a mirror up here as well. I probly won't be able to leave it up to long.. but hopefully long enough for others to mirror it as well.. hint.. hint.
What I feel should be done to microsoft at this point is nothing. Now that the judge has ruled that they are indeed a monopoly (not there was ever much doubt of that in our minds) all the people that used to be Microsofts best customers.. the PHB's of the world, have to set up and take notice of the fact that they have placed thier entire business in the hands of a monopoly.
If the has to be some kind of remedy imposed I would argue in favor of breaking them up like the baby bells. This is the only solution I can see that would really restrain them in the future.
Don't forget to look into Sybase.. I've had great luck using it for our website. It's not quite as fast as MySQL but it more than makes up for it by supporting transaction IMHO. Plus it's a free (unsupported) download from Redhat and I think a few other Distro's websites.
There are some rights that law does not allow us to consent to give away. For example, you are not allowed to sign your freedom away to become an indentured servant, at any price.
You are right to a point.. but ever heard of something called the U.S. (and other countries as well I'm sure) Military.. I've often wondered how the goverment gets around this one.
I somewhat disagree with this thread.. Yes I have had my X-sessions crash before.. so I lost my work.. But everyone else in my home network did not, as all the Daemons were still running. Everyone was still on the Internet, Samba was still pushing files, and all that. So I was the only one affected. Maybe that count's as a half a crash..... But at work if the NT Server crashes the whole damn office is screaming bloody murder.. and of course I don't even dare to use it as a workstation, like I do my home server. The point I'm making is that Linux (and unix in general) is better becouse it is modular.