Richard Stallman the man behind the FSF and the GPL has written a short piece on why the term intellectual property should not be used. Personally, I think it shouldn’t be used just because when I see the acronym IP, I think network protocol, not intellectual property.
Karen picked up a pumpkin on the way home from work today and made a Jack-o-lantern. Happy Halloween!
The blog spammers have found me. I woke up to lots of comment approval requests this morning. Fortunately, due to Bob’s incident I had already turned on the comment approval feature. Since there is a link on his site back here I figured there was a good chance they would hit me soon.
It’s disgusting how these people will take advantage of others for their own gain.
Has anyone else noticed how bad the search features of most websites are? When trying to find the two RCU links in my last blog entry I first attempted to find them using the search features on the Linux Journal website. None of the returned results were what I wanted. So after trying a few queries I turned to Google. I did a search with “site:linuxjournal.com” appended to the same search terms I had tried with the Linux Journal search engine. Right there on the first page were links to both articles I was looking for.
Why do sites even bother having their own search?
This still amazes me. A single Linux kernel image can be used for a 512 CPU machine. See SGI’s work here and the related SlashDot story. Sure you may have heard about Linux clusters with thousands of CPUs before. However, in most cases this was a cluster of machines with 1-4 processors each. The scalability requirements from the kernel side of things are very different when you are dealing with a few CPUs versus 512. You can find out more about the Altrix line at SGI‘s website.
Linux running the worlds fastest computer, wow!
What really fascinates me about this scalability work is the algorithms required. Making a system like this work efficiently isn’t about small optimizations it’s about having algorithms that can scale well.
One technique currently used in the Linux kernel is RCU. Linux journal has had couple of good articles on RCU which are available from their website.
The first release of the Linux QoS Library (LQL) which was on August 31st has been well received. LQL 0.5.0 has been downloaded about 150 times. I have received a few very nice emails from people ecstatic about it, including one even before I had completed sending the release announcements. The first LQL patch arrived in my inbox yesterday; though I haven’t had time to look at it yet.
The resumption of classes has meant I have not had as much time to work on LQL as I would like. However, I have been making slow progress on some new features.
Currently, I am adding statistics support to the QDiscs. This new API will return all of the information in struct tc_stats. The current implementation of this requires a few new classes.
-+ LQLStats ----+ LQLStatsQDisc ------+ LQLStatsQDiscHTB ------+ LQLStatsQDiscSFQ ------+ etc
The LQLQDisc class is getting a new method called lql_qdisc_get_stats() which each subclass will override to return their own LQLStatsQDisc object that contains methods specialized for the specific QDisc. So the expected usage is something like the following.
LQLStatsQDiscHTB *statsHTB = NULL;
statsHTB = lql_qdisc_htb_get_stats(LQL_QDISC(htb));
g_print("Bytes: %i\n", lql_stats_get_enqueued_bytes(LQL_STATS(statsHTB)));
g_print("Packets: %i\n", lql_stats_get_enqueued_packets(LQL_STATS(statsHTB)));
Once the QDisc statistics features are done I will begin on the classes.
I just had to post about this. Check out this hilarious short movie, Fellowship 9/11. IFilm.com hosts the actual movie. It appears they have lots of independent short movies available.
Oh happy day. Creative Commons Canada is being officially launched in Ottawa today. This means that there are now versions of the Creative Commons licenses available that are tailored to Canadian copyright law.
If you don’t know what the Creative Commons is, you need to spend some time watching the MPEG and Flash movies on the primary Creative Commons site.
Despite what the “always bad news first” nightly news programs may make you think murder rates were at a 30 year low in 2003.
It’s too bad that the CBC decided it was necessary to feature the bad news predominately. CTV also managed to put in their own little bit of fear mongering on the eleven o’clock news.
Michael Geist has written another great piece encouraging balanced copyright reform.
I still find it surprising that the Liberal led Heritage committee is so biased towards the content creators. Content creation groups have apparently out numbered content user groups at these hearings by a wide margin. How can this be right? Surely, there are more people using copyrighted material than there are creators. It’s odd how governments can forget who they actually represent.
I think the biggest obstacle to reasonable discussions on intellectual property issues is that it is very easy to quantify what more restrictive laws will do for the content creators; it’s all money. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to quantify the loss that is incurred throughout our culture by these same laws. What is the cost of works not entering the public domain? What interesting new industries could be formed by freed content? What is the cost when a school teacher cannot adequately teach her students? These are all next to impossible to quantify.
People like simple things. I believe our governmental representatives are no exception. Perhaps they are just leaning towards what they actually can get a mental grip on.