Nobody's changing it. And there is more than one way to handle print spooling in Unix already.
lpr isn't so great. I haven't reviewed IPP as I haven't needed it, but I assume it's designed to work in larger networks, too. Networks that suffer from failures, high latencies, low bandwidth, so on.
Also, it's a single protocol approved by several OS companies. Meaning we don't need to set up samba on Unix or separate lpr on Windows - Unix will come with IPP as the standard print queue as will Windows. And Mac. And anything else You want. Perhaps even Bluetooth Palm with IPP - want the notes You wrote in the meeting onto paper? No need to first sync to computer and then print through samba which redirects to remote printer using lpr - the remote printer being two meters from where You stood when You wanted the notes on paper.
No, I don't. I can read Finnish financial reports. It takes some time, but I know the terms, have done accounting myself, and review and sign annual financial report for a small company every year believing that I've completely understood and comprehended the report and thus am capable of signing it in good faith.
But I'm not an economist. The reports mentioned are not in Finnish, and the laws regarding accounting, and the terminology, is a little different. It would take me a lot of time to read and comprehend Sony's annual report. Would this thread be live when I'm through with it?
So, please educate me. Give me numbers. Show me lines in the financial reports I mentioned. Or show me other financial reports, tell me what they mean, where is the income, what are the expenses, and why the hell isn't the company making huge profits as could be assumed from the comments here and elsewhere.
I read the article by Courtney Love linked in another reply. It seems to me that the artists are really being ripped off. But who the fuck is getting all that money? How, and why? There must be acceptable expenses, or I'd bet the shareholders of companies owning those major labels would be screaming bloody murder for not getting the profits the company should be making.
What are the labels anyway? Companies (incorporated, limited, whatever - in Finnish that'd be osakeyhtiö)? Registered, tax-paying companies, or just divisions of some company that does much more?
If the labels are companies, or at least there are registered companies that comprise of nothing but the labels, those companies must produce annual financial reports, even if not publicly traded. And the reports are public. They might not be available without request. But they are public and thus available on request. So get those reports, read them, and tell me where the hell is the money going. For money doesn't just disappear. Someone's getting money - even that money that apparently should've gone to the artist.
The big labels also keep most of the profits derived from the artists work, and only very sucsessful artists can make much money at all.
I've heard this said quite many times, but I've never seen any real information about this. Speculative and hypotethical cases, yes, but no hard data. My sceptisism raises from the view that there is no free lunch, no instant money (not counting dotcoms and VC).
If anyone has real, hard, financial data to back these accusations with, I'm interested to see that and then reconsider my views.
For the record, these comments (especially the linked document to a page presenting hypotethical money flows of a band moving to big label) were enough to make me do queries about the subject. I'm currently waiting for an answer from Epe Helenius (founder and CEO of a biggish Finnish recording company Poko Rekords), but in the meantime, are there recording companies with investor relations data on the web?
Sony has Annual Report on the web. Did You know that Sony Music made 28.4B Yen operating income on 706.9 B Yen operating revenue? Not about 60% like some people seem to think.
Time Warner has Annual Report on the web. Warner Music Group made operating income of 179M USD on operating revenue of 3834M USD. That's 4.7% - better than Sony Music, but still not much.
You can go look the other companies Yourself. But I don't think they do much better. And, if You're not satisfied with the overall music group revenue/income ratio, read the 100+ page financial reports, write a letter to their investor relations (buy one share if You will) with questions.
I'm NOT saying that Big Record Companies are good. I'm saying that they're not the goldmines people seem to assume. And I haven't seen indie CDs on sale for the 4$ some people believe the CD should cost. Please, back Your accusations with hard data if You want to be believed in.
That doesn't tell enough. It tells me that n1.dn.net is the SOA for 209.207.224/24 C-class. Which means that said IP-block is Verio's. But I couldn't find out whether the block containing.245 is registered to Verio and not delegated.
Eg. with RIPE whois I can check IP-delegation, eg. that a Finnish IP-block is registered to some organization, delegated from a larger block registered to Finnish ISP, and in the end part of RIPE block. All of this with whois.
There are stupid moderations. I've been thinking why have so few negative moderation descriptions, like "Stupid" (as opposed to insightful).. I've sometimes needed "Overrated" just because something had been moderated up as interesting or insightful while it was at best informative.
Mostly, the modaration system works. I usually read at 3 because I want to read the articles and see if the/.ers have something extremely interesting (or very funny) things to say about it. When I want to read the discussion, I read at 1 or 2.
Generally, I'd advice reading at one less than You really want, because while that way You get lots of crap (compared to the level You wanted), You catch most of the excellent articles that have been written later in the discussion (and haven't thus been seen by enough moderators to bring them up). And at the higher levels (3-5), there is crap anyway. Either trolls have gained mods, the moderators are on crack, or it just represents the average/.er (and mods are for average mostly).
Of course the moderation/read treshold system could be modeled anew by trying to analyze the moderation that has happened in the last half a year or so (should have enough material at least). If anything like that would ever happen, I'd mostly like to read the 10 best comments, whether that means (in levels) 2 or 5 (although I doubt the latter could really happen - by mismoderation only, I think). Or perhaps the top 10%. Or perhaps I would like to create a profile that tells what moderators I respect and whom I don't want to affect anything I read.
Moderation system is open-ended in possibilities. Profiles with intelligent treshold management and moderator matching are of course possible, might be nice even, but would require some serious analysis of the material available, knowledge about suitable methods and how to apply them, and lots of work. Something I'm probably not qualified for (and neither are most of the other/.ers - You're either a fool or working on said field if You think You're qualified).
Sharing is of course legal and to be encouraged. But You can only share what You own or what the owner has given for You to share.
Piracy is sharing that's not endorsed by the owner of the shared material.
I've pirated software in my time. But the piracy circles weren't all that fun. Sometimes pirates were hackers trying to beat other hackers in breaking some copyprotection (competitive hacking was fun), but sometimes they just wanted to gloat about what they did (this was especially true of the trivial protections and later of material by the big, evil corps). When corps noticed that copyprotection doesn't work, piracy became just making the software (and other bitstreams) available.
The manuals were the copyprotection in software at some time. The software was so big that You couldn't really do anything useful without having the manual (and probably taking a course or two about the software). With games the manual was even more important, as it contained the background material to understand the game and possibly more (in adventure games the manual could list items, spells, people, places, have maps, and so on). But, as paperbound manuals cost money, manuals were moved to the CDs, be they PDFs, interactive help systems, whatever. And the bits on the CD are easy to distribute with the pirated software, unlike the paper manuals.
So, piracy is currently about making bits available, nothing more fancy. And the pirated software is usually not of the quality of bought software: to conserve space (make the package small enough to distribute over the net), parts are often clipped. Like the help system or whatever the pirate has thought is not needed.
Pirated music is usually of substandard quality (mp3s @ 128kbps or something like that). Same for videos.
So, while I do have some mp3s lying on my drives, most of those are from my own CDs, because then I can use whatever encoder I believe produces decent results, and encode at high enough bitrate. The quality thus is good enough for my computer-connected audio system - would be good enough for car, too, and portable players with decent headphones.
And the rest of the mp3s are stuff I've found and listened to. Some of those are just plain impossible to find, some I didn't like, and some I've bought as CDs because I've liked the music and wanted to have the originals.
When I like something I've got in pirated form, I usually buy it. Because if I won't buy it, it's going to sell less and no more of the same stuff is produced. I hope the others do the same.
I believe that movie theaters will stay
on
Movies Online?
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· Score: 1
There is no substitution to the real thing.
I can't (yet) afford a home theater. That is, a room with suitable acoustics, good seats for me and a couple of friends (6-12 seats), quality audio and video.
I currently have decent TV and stereos. There is room for five persons (3 if all want good seats related to sound and picture). But the picture is small and audio isn't really THAT good.
If I had a nice home theatre room with good audio system, I'd probably need about 2x1m picture. Which means that I'd very much like to have 2000x1000 pixels at 24+ frames per second.
Should all of that magically happen (should I get huge raise, should my investments be perfect, and given time for the money to multiply, and should digital video resolution jump), I'd need lots and lots of bandwidth to download movies of that quality. Not to worry - when I have that money, the bandwidth is commonplace:-)
Even if all that happened, I'd still go to movies because that's the way to experience the real thing. Yes, I'd like those tv/video movies and video releases of Real Movies, but to get the Real Experience, I'd had to get a real movie theatre and invite all my friends to see the movie.
But, for video and tv releases, online digital movies would be nice. And there are lots of movies that can't afford theatrical releases. Perhaps, at last, we could see all the small productions without the need to have friend of a friend of a friend who has heard that somebody has it, who might be able to arrange a copy when he can contact his friend who knows who has it and so on.
Now, what's the quality of current digital video available on the net? The picture is usually tiny (320x240 or alike), the sound is so-and-so (64kHz stereo). So, as I listen to net radios, watch music videos and some movies found on the net, when I hear or see something I like, I try to find it and buy it - on a media that preserves quality better, even VHS (just try to tell me that the sucking quality of VHS isn't better than what's found in the net).
I tried whois at nsi.com, but came up with nothing. What's the current way for checking up IP-blocks? Because I clearly remember "-L ddd.ddd.ddd" responding with the whois record of the c-class owner..
Still, reverse lookups came up with dn.net (Verio), and also that ns1.andover.net was 196. Unfortunately I still didn't know how to properly check IP-block delegation, so I can't be sure, but it seems to me that andover.net has 207.209.224.196/26, which comes from Verio's 207.209.224.0/24 C-class. It also might be that the reverse DNS hasn't been delegated from Verio to Andover, and so Andover doesn't have reverses set up for all systems - a common situation even though unfortunate.
The GUI for managing my RAID subsystem is called DPT StorageManager. What else did You need to know?
OK, the security model is a tricky thing. First, what do You mean with W2k security model? NT borrowed a lot from VMS (which is nice, but could've been done even better), and when correctly applied, was better than the typical Unix uid/gid system.
But, as usual, even security is probably less than 10% technology. You need decent security policy and good managers who know what those policies mean, and administrators who implement the technical side of the policy. Unfortunately, there is a widespread notion that anyone can manage Windows network, even though it's even not any easier than managing a Unix based network. Probably because Unix comes with arcane text-based interface for administration, while Windows has GUI for that. Of course even that idea (that Unix has only text-based admin tools) is mostly obsolete.
Part of the problem in Windows security management is the software: try to install Windows software centrally and securely. Try to manage WinNT security audits. And so on.
Of course as I don't have proper training (MSCE? What's really the proper training for managing Windows based networks?), my opinions are biased. But I'd take on a VMS+Linux network any day before WindowsNT.
In the end of the day, You just have to ask "What do I *NEED* and how will I get that?" The answer may be Windows or Linux, or something else. For me the answer has been Windows and Linux, but there is no way I'll expose Windows to internet, nor would I run services on Windows if I can run the same service on Linux.
Perhaps because only ASCI can afford those way too expensive computers? I think when ASCI Red was unveiled, they allowed for up to 50% of the CPU time to be used for non-ASCI research projects.
The top of the line supercomputers are listed in TOP500 Supercomputing Sites latest list. Clearly there are more than ASCI Nuclear Research computers. I don't remember Slashdot reporting installation of the two new non-ASCI teraflop computers, though. Perhaps only the best is of interest to the slashdot crowd.
Here in Europe we've gotten over the e's. Now everything is m:-)
OK, we've got "e-mostly everything" covered so now we're getting "m-the first things", like m-commerce (being able to buy using mobile whatever, usually cell phone), m-business (being able to create an order using mobile whatever while at customer's place), and so on. I'm surprised they haven't invented m-communications (being able to talk to that cell phone).
Yes, I do believe in e-economy (and m-economy) for what's it worth. But not in the hype-form. It's much more than the hype shows, and most of it will happen in the background.
I don't rely on only-network management, so I have something labeled as "CPU Switch" that does the usual: keyboard, mouse, monitor sharing - plug in one of each and said connectors from several computers.
And I believe it's a good thing to have console access. Just today I noticed one computer had lost track of network. And why would I ever allow network connections to my firewall? Through, yes, but to the box? Console access is good for broken hardware cases, too. And lots more.
That's not an SMTP problem. It's a problem with RFC822 (STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES) -based email. SMTP is a *transport* protocol that does the job quite well.
And actually, MIME extensions allow for multipart email, where each part can be encoded differently. I think that works pretty well, too: You can send a bunch of stuff, all of it gets bundled into a single file which again is transferred to the resipient using transport protocols, and the resipient is then free to do whatever he wants with the bundle - usually opening it using a program that knows how to handle such bundles (mail user agents) is a reasonable option. Using software that tries to run every file it gets its hands on is another thing, unrelated to this.
In Finland, it's illegal to link to overseas gambling services. The government has stated that as it's illegal to promote gambling except for the government monopoly, linking to a site that provides gambling facilities is illegal.
I think in that case it's fairly clear, for as long as the linked site clearly provides gambling facilities and the link is in a context that seems to promote gambling.
I think it's illegal to assist in a crime or promote crime about everywhere. The problem is that it's a thin line: eg. Finnish Cannabis Association *IS* legal, and their mission is to make owning and using cannabis legal. Some people believe this means promoting crime (and by publishing related articles, also assisting in crime), while others believe that they're not guilty of any criminal activity, and as their activity is directed to trying to change legislation through providing information, lobbying, etc, their activities are legal.
We can ask the same about many things, including hyperlinking to material that might not be legal. Still, up to date it has seemed that linking to material that is clearly illegal MIGHT constitute the crime of promoting crime or assisting in crime, but for as long as it can't be shown that the material is clearly illegal and that the person or organization linking to the material must clearly have been aware of the illegality of the material they've been linking to, they should be considered innocent but as they have, during the process, been notified of the illegality of the material they're linking to, the moment it has become clear, they should've removed the link.
So, as Linux/Apache webservers aren't all that uncommon, how about running SQL-server on one card and application server on another? All the machine is left to handle on main CPU(s) is Apache that queues processes for the cards and tosses results back to the HTTP pipe.
I think the number of contributors to Linux kernel was around 2500 at the time of 2.0 release. Could be wrong, of course, and I don't remember where did I get the figure. Still, if we assume it was 2500, I'd believe 4000 now, but 40k? No way.
Then there is the question of what's a contribution? I have contributed (code) to Linux kernel some years back. None of the code is left in the kernel anymore, that I know. I did contribute because I found a bug in a feature I needed, and could with reasonable work isolate it and fix it. None of that is left because that fix, while working, wasn't clean enough - it was just the typical hack.
So, the 4000 contributors probably includes people like me: a fix that has been rewritten already.
How about people who've contributed by pointing out a bug, but not being able to isolate it or fix it? They're important people. They're part of the peer review group. And those who document things? People who write an article or document describing some functionality or feature? Their contribution is extremely important, even when their articles don't end up in FAQ/HOWTO/man-page/other doc series. Because their documents may help other people write good documentation. Parts of their documents may end up in some FAQ or another, and even if it doesn't, it's a contribution that is most likely to help somebody.
And the rest of the crowd? Where do we draw the line?
I'm not saying that Linus and Alan shouldn't get the bright light pointed at their eyes in big conferences - they are probably the two most important Linux hackers and contributors. As are a host of others who oversee some part of the kernel or make major contributions or just make hell of a lot of contributions. But alongside these major contributors are the people who make occasional fixes, and then the people who don't have a line in the current kernel. And all of these are important.
They're strong enough by themselves. Note that eg. IBM officially supports RedHat Linux and certifies hardware for RedHat compliance.
Note that there is the big thing called package management: there is RPM, deb, and "anything else". It's unlikely that marriages over package management lines can be successfull, because any company that has invested in some distribution has developed process for building some type of package, and there are some very real differences between those.
Marriages of hardware vendor, VAR, distro builder, software company, etc. are a different thing, of course. Eg. CompaQ probably hasn't invested much into any one package management system or knowhow in one of those, so they're free to choose which distro builder to buy, and so on. Still note that IBM doesn't support and doesn't have any plans to support any distribution using deb packages. They can send You RPMs but not debs. And they have Lotus. So perhaps CompaQ will go for Corel to get a distro that is incompatible with anything IBM supports, and office software in the bundle. But then there would be Debian ties in the package, which would make some things harder.
It's been a while since I last talked about backbones and their interconnects with those who know, but I don't think things have changed much.
We have a central Finnish Commercial Internet Exchange (www.ficix.fi), which is an organization that keeps one system, backbone router, up and running. Members of the organization are ISPs, universities, and other internet backbones. There are some basic requirements like not routing international traffic through FICIX, that the members must be internet backbone providers and have their own international links, be participants in RIPE (European Internet Council or something like that), some other organizational and technical requirements. But the traffic routed through FICIX doesn't cost a dime. It's peering. What costs, is membership in FICIX.
So, small ISPs can't participate because they don't have their own international links, or perhaps they can't fullfill some other requirements.
Now, I live in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. It's easy to get internet access in some areas, while a bit harder in some other. Anyway, if I ask for 10+ Mbps connection, I'm likely to get answers from only the four or so major ISPs. Their prizes will be fairly similar, too. The differences will be in international traffic. Also they have different classifications for domestic and international traffic - their own network is usually considered domestic, and may span either Finland or whole Scandinavia. Or more. Domestic bandwidth is usually guaranteed, FICIX and international bandwidth are best effort. And buying guaranteed intl bandwidth costs quite a lot - something in the range of 5kUSD/1Mbps/month, whereas 10Mbps with best effort intl costs about 2kUSD/month. 100Mbps isn't much more expensive than 10.
So, in Finland I can easily see why small ISPs can't participate in peering: they can't fullfill the requirements reg. RIPE participation and guaranteed intl. bandwidth. The difference between small and large becomes telco or not. Telcos have many requirements about their QoS in phone lines imposed by the government, and they already need intl. bandwidth and agreements with intl. phone carriers. So extending those services and agreements to cover data bandwidth is easy for them. For small ISPs that only provide data even those QoS requirements are too costly, so they rather buy the bandwidth from telcos (big providers) who guarantee certain QoS reg. their agreed bandwidth and infrastructure.
I believe that peering is good, but it must have requirements. Those set by FICIX in Finland are IMHO good enough. Peering costs money even though it doesn't show in traffic costs. Somebody has to pay for that, in some way. Membership fees and org+tech requirements of FICIX guarantee that those capable and financially sound enough can participate in peering.
How about wanting both? I can't afford to keep two cars (two cars worth keeping, that is). And my primary need is transportation. So I want automatic everything. Now, if I could afford two cars, the first would be just for transportation. Routine. And the second would be for *when I want to drive*. I could take the first in the morning, hate the traffic, and get to work. And when I'm back home, wanting to visit a friend or alike, I could take the car I like. THAT is choice. But that's choice by money. In the end I'd want three cars anyway: one smallish coupe for driving in cities and small places, another large luxury sedan for driving everywhere else, and the third would be real no-nonsense racecar that just happens to be street legal. But that'd cost about 20M FIM in Finland, so perhaps I'd better dream of having two cars.
Have You ever installed RedHat? I don't remember exactly how the X-installation works, but I think it required choosing the size of the screen, possibly color depth. And when the system was installed and booted, I got X-login right up. Of course I do configure X after that, to get some things wokring just like I like them, but the defaults work and there is nothing wrong with them.
Hardware support? Put the manufacturer's "Device Driver Diskette for RedHat Linux 6.2" in the drive in installation if the device isn't supported by RH. I didn't read the manuals, so I don't know whether You'd need to invoce "setup" or "install" or whatever if You add hardware later on.
Probably it's all just that easy on SuSe/Caldera/Corel and other commercial distributions. Because the commercial distributions are targeting people who're not going to configure X. Free distros may be behind because they're not targeting novices but more experienced users.
Try IBM DB2 UDB. It has the cleanest licensing scheme I've ever seen: it fit completely on one slide:-)
It was something like 2500kUSD per processor, base license included two users, web server or app server was clearly defined as one user (adminstrator using real user access takes the other included license), yearly support fee something like 500USD.
Of course You can buy a big license for big bucks. But enterprise (with unlimited users and connections and so on) was only about 11kUSD/processor (PC hardware), support about 2kUSD/year.
I never asked the reps what does it cost on eg. Sun UE450 fully equipped (4xUltra IIi 440MHz or something like that, I think), but probably more than on a quad-xeon.
Finland has three categories of sales tax: 22% for everything not listed in other categories 17% for food 8% for books
I think 8% category contains also culture (could mean movies, plays, opera, concerts - but I'm not sure). And public transportation is probably in either 17% or 8% category. There are probably other goods that fall into categories below 22%, but as a concumer I have to pay sales tax anyway and mostly if it's not food or book, I seem to pay 22%. And as a company, I need to charge 22% of everything because I sell services, and get to write off the amount of sales tax I've paid, whether that's 22% or 8%.
Companies that sell anything to Finnish consumers, whether in Finland or from abroad in mail order or anything, have to pay sales tax. A company that sells over 50kFIM (9kUSD) to consumers in a year should register in Finland and route money transfers through their Finnish subsidiary. That way taxes would be easy to enforce for Finnish government, and actually the company gains some benefits in handling money transfers within Finland and then paying larges sums to the mother company, wherever that is. But that's a small gain.
Finnish companies that import goods, OTOH, have to prove the prices, taxes and customs they've paid. Within EU they get to write off the sales tax, and from outside EU they pay the sales tax themselves on the border and then get to write that off, and in the end must charge sales tax from the customer. Because they pay tax and write off exactly that, that's just paperwork, no money involved. I think. I don't import stuff - as a company.
Now, EU basically wants to enforce this kind of system EU wide for web-based transactions. Because transactions in web are hard to track and prove without authority in the countries the transaction took place in (and tracking consumers is insane - nobody wants to review every EU consumer's actions all the time, and it wouldn't be legal anyway), it would be easiest if the companies selling to EU customers would register subsidiaries within EU, thus opening them for EU taxation. They can register in any one EU country, but they probably should go to the country most of their customers come from, in case there are specific laws within that country regarding sales.
This is IMHO in the end a good thing. Until there is a "world government" that can enforce uniform rules around the globe, companies try to hide money as well as they can. And it's kind of hard for eg. Finnish government to request sales tax from Amazon's sales to Finland without US government's help. EU, as a larger entity, can more easily enforce this kind of rules. If US and EU had uniform sales tax and related laws, this wouldn't be necessary. But world government is still a far future idea.
What would You call i.root-servers.net. ? That machine is in Sweden, administered by Swedes. But it's just one of the many root servers.. I believe once there was a root server in Finland, and anyway,.fi domain is delegated to a Finnish server. Not so long ago it was run by research organizations, but when government took control of the domain, Eunet got techincal management contract, so.fi root-server is currently run by KPNQwest.
So, root-servers exist outside US already. There have nearly always been root-servers in Europe. I checked them every now and then to see which ones were closest to me, but haven't bothered with for some time.
I've worked as a systems administrator, too. In my first such job, I worked for an academic institution, and there was no policy about emails and such. Internet wasn't so hot, yet. It was mostly used by academics. But even then, should there have been policies about email usage, monitoring emails would've been the last thing I'd had time for. I read other people's emails when they came complaining about email not working. And I read the headers only, because I didn't need any more to work with.
Later on, I've come to the conclusion that systems administrators, even when allowed by the managers, don't have time to read other peoples email. There is work to do, and unless monitoring email is on high priority (in which case there are people whose job it is, who really don't do any technical administration), nobody is going to care. Yes, I've seen logs from web proxies - lots of *xxx*.com sites. Then the company established policies regarding surfing the web, and added blocklists to the proxies. Not just about porn, but eg. games-sites (young employees means playstation.com is high on the list). Some manager checked weekly log reports about which domains were hit most often, and added sites to blocklists.
But the main point is, unless there are huge resources for just monitoring people, nobody is going to have time to do it. OK, some weekly reports about domains most hit by browsers or email, something like that. And when there are problems (eg. administrators get virus warnings from email scanning subsystem), more close monitoring of single events.
I challenge anyone to tell that they really have worked in a position where they have really monitored people's doing, not because of something not working or alike, but just because a) they can or b) they're required to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's changing it. And there is more than one way to handle print spooling in Unix already.
lpr isn't so great. I haven't reviewed IPP as I haven't needed it, but I assume it's designed to work in larger networks, too. Networks that suffer from failures, high latencies, low bandwidth, so on.
Also, it's a single protocol approved by several OS companies. Meaning we don't need to set up samba on Unix or separate lpr on Windows - Unix will come with IPP as the standard print queue as will Windows. And Mac. And anything else You want. Perhaps even Bluetooth Palm with IPP - want the notes You wrote in the meeting onto paper? No need to first sync to computer and then print through samba which redirects to remote printer using lpr - the remote printer being two meters from where You stood when You wanted the notes on paper.
No, I don't. I can read Finnish financial reports. It takes some time, but I know the terms, have done accounting myself, and review and sign annual financial report for a small company every year believing that I've completely understood and comprehended the report and thus am capable of signing it in good faith.
But I'm not an economist. The reports mentioned are not in Finnish, and the laws regarding accounting, and the terminology, is a little different. It would take me a lot of time to read and comprehend Sony's annual report. Would this thread be live when I'm through with it?
So, please educate me. Give me numbers. Show me lines in the financial reports I mentioned. Or show me other financial reports, tell me what they mean, where is the income, what are the expenses, and why the hell isn't the company making huge profits as could be assumed from the comments here and elsewhere.
I read the article by Courtney Love linked in another reply. It seems to me that the artists are really being ripped off. But who the fuck is getting all that money? How, and why? There must be acceptable expenses, or I'd bet the shareholders of companies owning those major labels would be screaming bloody murder for not getting the profits the company should be making.
What are the labels anyway? Companies (incorporated, limited, whatever - in Finnish that'd be osakeyhtiö)? Registered, tax-paying companies, or just divisions of some company that does much more?
If the labels are companies, or at least there are registered companies that comprise of nothing but the labels, those companies must produce annual financial reports, even if not publicly traded. And the reports are public. They might not be available without request. But they are public and thus available on request. So get those reports, read them, and tell me where the hell is the money going. For money doesn't just disappear. Someone's getting money - even that money that apparently should've gone to the artist.
I've heard this said quite many times, but I've never seen any real information about this. Speculative and hypotethical cases, yes, but no hard data. My sceptisism raises from the view that there is no free lunch, no instant money (not counting dotcoms and VC).
If anyone has real, hard, financial data to back these accusations with, I'm interested to see that and then reconsider my views.
For the record, these comments (especially the linked document to a page presenting hypotethical money flows of a band moving to big label) were enough to make me do queries about the subject. I'm currently waiting for an answer from Epe Helenius (founder and CEO of a biggish Finnish recording company Poko Rekords), but in the meantime, are there recording companies with investor relations data on the web?
Sony has Annual Report on the web. Did You know that Sony Music made 28.4B Yen operating income on 706.9 B Yen operating revenue? Not about 60% like some people seem to think.
Time Warner has Annual Report on the web. Warner Music Group made operating income of 179M USD on operating revenue of 3834M USD. That's 4.7% - better than Sony Music, but still not much.
You can go look the other companies Yourself. But I don't think they do much better. And, if You're not satisfied with the overall music group revenue/income ratio, read the 100+ page financial reports, write a letter to their investor relations (buy one share if You will) with questions.
I'm NOT saying that Big Record Companies are good. I'm saying that they're not the goldmines people seem to assume. And I haven't seen indie CDs on sale for the 4$ some people believe the CD should cost. Please, back Your accusations with hard data if You want to be believed in.
I used nslookup instead of dig, but..
.245 is registered to Verio and not delegated.
That doesn't tell enough. It tells me that n1.dn.net is the SOA for 209.207.224/24 C-class. Which means that said IP-block is Verio's. But I couldn't find out whether the block containing
Eg. with RIPE whois I can check IP-delegation, eg. that a Finnish IP-block is registered to some organization, delegated from a larger block registered to Finnish ISP, and in the end part of RIPE block. All of this with whois.
There are stupid moderations. I've been thinking why have so few negative moderation descriptions, like "Stupid" (as opposed to insightful).. I've sometimes needed "Overrated" just because something had been moderated up as interesting or insightful while it was at best informative.
/.ers have something extremely interesting (or very funny) things to say about it. When I want to read the discussion, I read at 1 or 2.
/.er (and mods are for average mostly).
/.ers - You're either a fool or working on said field if You think You're qualified).
Mostly, the modaration system works. I usually read at 3 because I want to read the articles and see if the
Generally, I'd advice reading at one less than You really want, because while that way You get lots of crap (compared to the level You wanted), You catch most of the excellent articles that have been written later in the discussion (and haven't thus been seen by enough moderators to bring them up). And at the higher levels (3-5), there is crap anyway. Either trolls have gained mods, the moderators are on crack, or it just represents the average
Of course the moderation/read treshold system could be modeled anew by trying to analyze the moderation that has happened in the last half a year or so (should have enough material at least). If anything like that would ever happen, I'd mostly like to read the 10 best comments, whether that means (in levels) 2 or 5 (although I doubt the latter could really happen - by mismoderation only, I think). Or perhaps the top 10%. Or perhaps I would like to create a profile that tells what moderators I respect and whom I don't want to affect anything I read.
Moderation system is open-ended in possibilities. Profiles with intelligent treshold management and moderator matching are of course possible, might be nice even, but would require some serious analysis of the material available, knowledge about suitable methods and how to apply them, and lots of work. Something I'm probably not qualified for (and neither are most of the other
Is that a troll or what?
Sharing is of course legal and to be encouraged. But You can only share what You own or what the owner has given for You to share.
Piracy is sharing that's not endorsed by the owner of the shared material.
I've pirated software in my time. But the piracy circles weren't all that fun. Sometimes pirates were hackers trying to beat other hackers in breaking some copyprotection (competitive hacking was fun), but sometimes they just wanted to gloat about what they did (this was especially true of the trivial protections and later of material by the big, evil corps). When corps noticed that copyprotection doesn't work, piracy became just making the software (and other bitstreams) available.
The manuals were the copyprotection in software at some time. The software was so big that You couldn't really do anything useful without having the manual (and probably taking a course or two about the software). With games the manual was even more important, as it contained the background material to understand the game and possibly more (in adventure games the manual could list items, spells, people, places, have maps, and so on). But, as paperbound manuals cost money, manuals were moved to the CDs, be they PDFs, interactive help systems, whatever. And the bits on the CD are easy to distribute with the pirated software, unlike the paper manuals.
So, piracy is currently about making bits available, nothing more fancy. And the pirated software is usually not of the quality of bought software: to conserve space (make the package small enough to distribute over the net), parts are often clipped. Like the help system or whatever the pirate has thought is not needed.
Pirated music is usually of substandard quality (mp3s @ 128kbps or something like that). Same for videos.
So, while I do have some mp3s lying on my drives, most of those are from my own CDs, because then I can use whatever encoder I believe produces decent results, and encode at high enough bitrate. The quality thus is good enough for my computer-connected audio system - would be good enough for car, too, and portable players with decent headphones.
And the rest of the mp3s are stuff I've found and listened to. Some of those are just plain impossible to find, some I didn't like, and some I've bought as CDs because I've liked the music and wanted to have the originals.
When I like something I've got in pirated form, I usually buy it. Because if I won't buy it, it's going to sell less and no more of the same stuff is produced. I hope the others do the same.
There is no substitution to the real thing.
:-)
I can't (yet) afford a home theater. That is, a room with suitable acoustics, good seats for me and a couple of friends (6-12 seats), quality audio and video.
I currently have decent TV and stereos. There is room for five persons (3 if all want good seats related to sound and picture). But the picture is small and audio isn't really THAT good.
If I had a nice home theatre room with good audio system, I'd probably need about 2x1m picture. Which means that I'd very much like to have 2000x1000 pixels at 24+ frames per second.
Should all of that magically happen (should I get huge raise, should my investments be perfect, and given time for the money to multiply, and should digital video resolution jump), I'd need lots and lots of bandwidth to download movies of that quality. Not to worry - when I have that money, the bandwidth is commonplace
Even if all that happened, I'd still go to movies because that's the way to experience the real thing. Yes, I'd like those tv/video movies and video releases of Real Movies, but to get the Real Experience, I'd had to get a real movie theatre and invite all my friends to see the movie.
But, for video and tv releases, online digital movies would be nice. And there are lots of movies that can't afford theatrical releases. Perhaps, at last, we could see all the small productions without the need to have friend of a friend of a friend who has heard that somebody has it, who might be able to arrange a copy when he can contact his friend who knows who has it and so on.
Now, what's the quality of current digital video available on the net? The picture is usually tiny (320x240 or alike), the sound is so-and-so (64kHz stereo). So, as I listen to net radios, watch music videos and some movies found on the net, when I hear or see something I like, I try to find it and buy it - on a media that preserves quality better, even VHS (just try to tell me that the sucking quality of VHS isn't better than what's found in the net).
I tried whois at nsi.com, but came up with nothing. What's the current way for checking up IP-blocks? Because I clearly remember "-L ddd.ddd.ddd" responding with the whois record of the c-class owner..
Still, reverse lookups came up with dn.net (Verio), and also that ns1.andover.net was 196. Unfortunately I still didn't know how to properly check IP-block delegation, so I can't be sure, but it seems to me that andover.net has 207.209.224.196/26, which comes from Verio's 207.209.224.0/24 C-class. It also might be that the reverse DNS hasn't been delegated from Verio to Andover, and so Andover doesn't have reverses set up for all systems - a common situation even though unfortunate.
The GUI for managing my RAID subsystem is called DPT StorageManager. What else did You need to know?
OK, the security model is a tricky thing. First, what do You mean with W2k security model? NT borrowed a lot from VMS (which is nice, but could've been done even better), and when correctly applied, was better than the typical Unix uid/gid system.
But, as usual, even security is probably less than 10% technology. You need decent security policy and good managers who know what those policies mean, and administrators who implement the technical side of the policy. Unfortunately, there is a widespread notion that anyone can manage Windows network, even though it's even not any easier than managing a Unix based network. Probably because Unix comes with arcane text-based interface for administration, while Windows has GUI for that. Of course even that idea (that Unix has only text-based admin tools) is mostly obsolete.
Part of the problem in Windows security management is the software: try to install Windows software centrally and securely. Try to manage WinNT security audits. And so on.
Of course as I don't have proper training (MSCE? What's really the proper training for managing Windows based networks?), my opinions are biased. But I'd take on a VMS+Linux network any day before WindowsNT.
In the end of the day, You just have to ask "What do I *NEED* and how will I get that?" The answer may be Windows or Linux, or something else. For me the answer has been Windows and Linux, but there is no way I'll expose Windows to internet, nor would I run services on Windows if I can run the same service on Linux.
Perhaps because only ASCI can afford those way too expensive computers?
I think when ASCI Red was unveiled, they allowed for up to 50% of the CPU time to be used for non-ASCI research projects.
The top of the line supercomputers are listed in TOP500 Supercomputing Sites latest list. Clearly there are more than ASCI Nuclear Research computers. I don't remember Slashdot reporting installation of the two new non-ASCI teraflop computers, though. Perhaps only the best is of interest to the slashdot crowd.
Here in Europe we've gotten over the e's. Now everything is m :-)
OK, we've got "e-mostly everything" covered so now we're getting "m-the first things", like m-commerce (being able to buy using mobile whatever, usually cell phone), m-business (being able to create an order using mobile whatever while at customer's place), and so on. I'm surprised they haven't invented m-communications (being able to talk to that cell phone).
Yes, I do believe in e-economy (and m-economy) for what's it worth. But not in the hype-form. It's much more than the hype shows, and most of it will happen in the background.
I don't rely on only-network management, so I have something labeled as "CPU Switch" that does the usual: keyboard, mouse, monitor sharing - plug in one of each and said connectors from several computers.
And I believe it's a good thing to have console access. Just today I noticed one computer had lost track of network. And why would I ever allow network connections to my firewall? Through, yes, but to the box? Console access is good for broken hardware cases, too. And lots more.
That's not an SMTP problem. It's a problem with RFC822 (STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES) -based email. SMTP is a *transport* protocol that does the job quite well.
And actually, MIME extensions allow for multipart email, where each part can be encoded differently. I think that works pretty well, too: You can send a bunch of stuff, all of it gets bundled into a single file which again is transferred to the resipient using transport protocols, and the resipient is then free to do whatever he wants with the bundle - usually opening it using a program that knows how to handle such bundles (mail user agents) is a reasonable option. Using software that tries to run every file it gets its hands on is another thing, unrelated to this.
In Finland, it's illegal to link to overseas gambling services. The government has stated that as it's illegal to promote gambling except for the government monopoly, linking to a site that provides gambling facilities is illegal.
I think in that case it's fairly clear, for as long as the linked site clearly provides gambling facilities and the link is in a context that seems to promote gambling.
I think it's illegal to assist in a crime or promote crime about everywhere. The problem is that it's a thin line: eg. Finnish Cannabis Association *IS* legal, and their mission is to make owning and using cannabis legal. Some people believe this means promoting crime (and by publishing related articles, also assisting in crime), while others believe that they're not guilty of any criminal activity, and as their activity is directed to trying to change legislation through providing information, lobbying, etc, their activities are legal.
We can ask the same about many things, including hyperlinking to material that might not be legal. Still, up to date it has seemed that linking to material that is clearly illegal MIGHT constitute the crime of promoting crime or assisting in crime, but for as long as it can't be shown that the material is clearly illegal and that the person or organization linking to the material must clearly have been aware of the illegality of the material they've been linking to, they should be considered innocent but as they have, during the process, been notified of the illegality of the material they're linking to, the moment it has become clear, they should've removed the link.
So, as Linux/Apache webservers aren't all that uncommon, how about running SQL-server on one card and application server on another? All the machine is left to handle on main CPU(s) is Apache that queues processes for the cards and tosses results back to the HTTP pipe.
I think the number of contributors to Linux kernel was around 2500 at the time of 2.0 release. Could be wrong, of course, and I don't remember where did I get the figure.
Still, if we assume it was 2500, I'd believe 4000 now, but 40k? No way.
Then there is the question of what's a contribution? I have contributed (code) to Linux kernel some years back. None of the code is left in the kernel anymore, that I know. I did contribute because I found a bug in a feature I needed, and could with reasonable work isolate it and fix it. None of that is left because that fix, while working, wasn't clean enough - it was just the typical hack.
So, the 4000 contributors probably includes people like me: a fix that has been rewritten already.
How about people who've contributed by pointing out a bug, but not being able to isolate it or fix it? They're important people. They're part of the peer review group.
And those who document things? People who write an article or document describing some functionality or feature? Their contribution is extremely important, even when their articles don't end up in FAQ/HOWTO/man-page/other doc series. Because their documents may help other people write good documentation. Parts of their documents may end up in some FAQ or another, and even if it doesn't, it's a contribution that is most likely to help somebody.
And the rest of the crowd? Where do we draw the line?
I'm not saying that Linus and Alan shouldn't get the bright light pointed at their eyes in big conferences - they are probably the two most important Linux hackers and contributors. As are a host of others who oversee some part of the kernel or make major contributions or just make hell of a lot of contributions. But alongside these major contributors are the people who make occasional fixes, and then the people who don't have a line in the current kernel. And all of these are important.
They're strong enough by themselves. Note that eg. IBM officially supports RedHat Linux and certifies hardware for RedHat compliance.
Note that there is the big thing called package management: there is RPM, deb, and "anything else". It's unlikely that marriages over package management lines can be successfull, because any company that has invested in some distribution has developed process for building some type of package, and there are some very real differences between those.
Marriages of hardware vendor, VAR, distro builder, software company, etc. are a different thing, of course. Eg. CompaQ probably hasn't invested much into any one package management system or knowhow in one of those, so they're free to choose which distro builder to buy, and so on. Still note that IBM doesn't support and doesn't have any plans to support any distribution using deb packages. They can send You RPMs but not debs. And they have Lotus. So perhaps CompaQ will go for Corel to get a distro that is incompatible with anything IBM supports, and office software in the bundle. But then there would be Debian ties in the package, which would make some things harder.
You can't marry Debian to a company that's out to make money. Debian is philosophically Open Source.
You could try to marry a company that developes a distribution based on debian (Corel, anyone?), though.
It's been a while since I last talked about backbones and their interconnects with those who know, but I don't think things have changed much.
We have a central Finnish Commercial Internet Exchange (www.ficix.fi), which is an organization that keeps one system, backbone router, up and running. Members of the organization are ISPs, universities, and other internet backbones. There are some basic requirements like not routing international traffic through FICIX, that the members must be internet backbone providers and have their own international links, be participants in RIPE (European Internet Council or something like that), some other organizational and technical requirements. But the traffic routed through FICIX doesn't cost a dime. It's peering. What costs, is membership in FICIX.
So, small ISPs can't participate because they don't have their own international links, or perhaps they can't fullfill some other requirements.
Now, I live in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. It's easy to get internet access in some areas, while a bit harder in some other. Anyway, if I ask for 10+ Mbps connection, I'm likely to get answers from only the four or so major ISPs. Their prizes will be fairly similar, too. The differences will be in international traffic. Also they have different classifications for domestic and international traffic - their own network is usually considered domestic, and may span either Finland or whole Scandinavia. Or more. Domestic bandwidth is usually guaranteed, FICIX and international bandwidth are best effort. And buying guaranteed intl bandwidth costs quite a lot - something in the range of 5kUSD/1Mbps/month, whereas 10Mbps with best effort intl costs about 2kUSD/month. 100Mbps isn't much more expensive than 10.
So, in Finland I can easily see why small ISPs can't participate in peering: they can't fullfill the requirements reg. RIPE participation and guaranteed intl. bandwidth. The difference between small and large becomes telco or not. Telcos have many requirements about their QoS in phone lines imposed by the government, and they already need intl. bandwidth and agreements with intl. phone carriers. So extending those services and agreements to cover data bandwidth is easy for them. For small ISPs that only provide data even those QoS requirements are too costly, so they rather buy the bandwidth from telcos (big providers) who guarantee certain QoS reg. their agreed bandwidth and infrastructure.
I believe that peering is good, but it must have requirements. Those set by FICIX in Finland are IMHO good enough. Peering costs money even though it doesn't show in traffic costs. Somebody has to pay for that, in some way. Membership fees and org+tech requirements of FICIX guarantee that those capable and financially sound enough can participate in peering.
How about wanting both?
I can't afford to keep two cars (two cars worth keeping, that is). And my primary need is transportation. So I want automatic everything.
Now, if I could afford two cars, the first would be just for transportation. Routine. And the second would be for *when I want to drive*. I could take the first in the morning, hate the traffic, and get to work. And when I'm back home, wanting to visit a friend or alike, I could take the car I like.
THAT is choice. But that's choice by money. In the end I'd want three cars anyway: one smallish coupe for driving in cities and small places, another large luxury sedan for driving everywhere else, and the third would be real no-nonsense racecar that just happens to be street legal. But that'd cost about 20M FIM in Finland, so perhaps I'd better dream of having two cars.
Have You ever installed RedHat? I don't remember exactly how the X-installation works, but I think it required choosing the size of the screen, possibly color depth. And when the system was installed and booted, I got X-login right up. Of course I do configure X after that, to get some things wokring just like I like them, but the defaults work and there is nothing wrong with them.
Hardware support? Put the manufacturer's "Device Driver Diskette for RedHat Linux 6.2" in the drive in installation if the device isn't supported by RH. I didn't read the manuals, so I don't know whether You'd need to invoce "setup" or "install" or whatever if You add hardware later on.
Probably it's all just that easy on SuSe/Caldera/Corel and other commercial distributions. Because the commercial distributions are targeting people who're not going to configure X. Free distros may be behind because they're not targeting novices but more experienced users.
Try IBM DB2 UDB. It has the cleanest licensing scheme I've ever seen: it fit completely on one slide :-)
It was something like 2500kUSD per processor, base license included two users, web server or app server was clearly defined as one user (adminstrator using real user access takes the other included license), yearly support fee something like 500USD.
Of course You can buy a big license for big bucks. But enterprise (with unlimited users and connections and so on) was only about 11kUSD/processor (PC hardware), support about 2kUSD/year.
I never asked the reps what does it cost on eg. Sun UE450 fully equipped (4xUltra IIi 440MHz or something like that, I think), but probably more than on a quad-xeon.
Finland has three categories of sales tax:
22% for everything not listed in other categories
17% for food
8% for books
I think 8% category contains also culture (could mean movies, plays, opera, concerts - but I'm not sure).
And public transportation is probably in either 17% or 8% category. There are probably other goods that fall into categories below 22%, but as a concumer I have to pay sales tax anyway and mostly if it's not food or book, I seem to pay 22%. And as a company, I need to charge 22% of everything because I sell services, and get to write off the amount of sales tax I've paid, whether that's 22% or 8%.
Companies that sell anything to Finnish consumers, whether in Finland or from abroad in mail order or anything, have to pay sales tax. A company that sells over 50kFIM (9kUSD) to consumers in a year should register in Finland and route money transfers through their Finnish subsidiary. That way taxes would be easy to enforce for Finnish government, and actually the company gains some benefits in handling money transfers within Finland and then paying larges sums to the mother company, wherever that is. But that's a small gain.
Finnish companies that import goods, OTOH, have to prove the prices, taxes and customs they've paid. Within EU they get to write off the sales tax, and from outside EU they pay the sales tax themselves on the border and then get to write that off, and in the end must charge sales tax from the customer. Because they pay tax and write off exactly that, that's just paperwork, no money involved. I think. I don't import stuff - as a company.
Now, EU basically wants to enforce this kind of system EU wide for web-based transactions. Because transactions in web are hard to track and prove without authority in the countries the transaction took place in (and tracking consumers is insane - nobody wants to review every EU consumer's actions all the time, and it wouldn't be legal anyway), it would be easiest if the companies selling to EU customers would register subsidiaries within EU, thus opening them for EU taxation. They can register in any one EU country, but they probably should go to the country most of their customers come from, in case there are specific laws within that country regarding sales.
This is IMHO in the end a good thing. Until there is a "world government" that can enforce uniform rules around the globe, companies try to hide money as well as they can. And it's kind of hard for eg. Finnish government to request sales tax from Amazon's sales to Finland without US government's help. EU, as a larger entity, can more easily enforce this kind of rules. If US and EU had uniform sales tax and related laws, this wouldn't be necessary. But world government is still a far future idea.
What would You call i.root-servers.net. ? That machine is in Sweden, administered by Swedes. But it's just one of the many root servers.. .fi domain is delegated to a Finnish server. Not so long ago it was run by research organizations, but when government took control of the domain, Eunet got techincal management contract, so .fi root-server is currently run by KPNQwest.
I believe once there was a root server in Finland, and anyway,
So, root-servers exist outside US already. There have nearly always been root-servers in Europe. I checked them every now and then to see which ones were closest to me, but haven't bothered with for some time.
I've worked as a systems administrator, too. In my first such job, I worked for an academic institution, and there was no policy about emails and such. Internet wasn't so hot, yet. It was mostly used by academics. But even then, should there have been policies about email usage, monitoring emails would've been the last thing I'd had time for. I read other people's emails when they came complaining about email not working. And I read the headers only, because I didn't need any more to work with.
Later on, I've come to the conclusion that systems administrators, even when allowed by the managers, don't have time to read other peoples email. There is work to do, and unless monitoring email is on high priority (in which case there are people whose job it is, who really don't do any technical administration), nobody is going to care. Yes, I've seen logs from web proxies - lots of *xxx*.com sites. Then the company established policies regarding surfing the web, and added blocklists to the proxies. Not just about porn, but eg. games-sites (young employees means playstation.com is high on the list). Some manager checked weekly log reports about which domains were hit most often, and added sites to blocklists.
But the main point is, unless there are huge resources for just monitoring people, nobody is going to have time to do it. OK, some weekly reports about domains most hit by browsers or email, something like that. And when there are problems (eg. administrators get virus warnings from email scanning subsystem), more close monitoring of single events.
I challenge anyone to tell that they really have worked in a position where they have really monitored people's doing, not because of something not working or alike, but just because a) they can or b) they're required to do it.