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I believe in Law [stanford.edu] that is for the people.

Apparently that would be Godwin's.

W

Speaking of Nazis, I just saw The Pianist yesterday. It was amazing. And based on a true story.

Look, in contrast, at the "next generation UNIX shell", rc, from Bell Labs. "rc" intends to simplify, remove unnecessary functionality, and factor out features like job control and command line editing.

You don't RC. Moore's Law is solely about logic circuit density.

-Ted

Some acronyms shouldn't be expanded more than one layer. GNU is an even better example.

The gorilla arm syndrome was caused by the combination of touchscreens with boxy, CRT monitors. Now that LCDs can be laid flat on a desk/lap, the strain on your arms will be similar to operating a mouse or pencil.

Mel, is that you? [The story of Mel]

I'm not; it's part of human nature. There are even people, who will find fault with the weather, when it's perfect, so why should 200.000 bug reports surprise anyone? And don't forget, lots of those may be a case of PEBKAC.

Stefan.

I sooo tempted to mod you down, but since you've already made it to +5, someone else would quickly come along a undo it, so it wouldn't be worth my modpoint.

Anyway...

"Thanks to a find on the internet and some heavy duty hacking"

I'm guessing that "find on the internet" is the downloading of the datasheet they found. I really, really doubt they consider that hacking. Most likely the "hacking" they did is doing whatever reverse enginerring was needed to make the info in the datasheet useful, and the actual process of writing the driver. Since the software being written right now is really just to get the job done, it most definatly qualifies as a hack according to The Jargon Dictionary.

fmaxwell, all I can say is that you have demonstrated the lack of ability by the people you hire to develop a solution successfully on anything but the latest development kit. I refer you to the story of Mel, would you not hire him? Mel

>> 2.8Ghz...my first computer didn't have that many MHz
> Log2 of 1000 is about 10, times 1.5 years ("Moore generation"), results in 15 years. Ergo, qurob's first computer was likely more than 15 years ago.

Probably nit picking but Moore's law refers to the transistor density of ICs, not to their clock frequency.

If you have the energy to post a rebuttal, have fun. I've done it too many times already.

I guess you are the geek. I have no idea what "fantasy character" OGG is named after (I believe you, it is just that you would have to be a geek to realize that it is a fantasy character).

Well, I'm geek enough to read Slashdot, which has mentioned in past articles that "Ogg Vorbis" has something to do with Terry Pratchett. I just looked up the FAQ at the Vorbis website, which pointed me to this page that confirms that Vorbis is from a character in one of his books, and Ogg is from the old game Netrek.

X-BOXES The plural of box is boxes, not boxen.

boxen /bok'sn/ pl.n. [very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.

Did I say ISO...

Meant normal people.

It gets really bad when version fatigue collides with creeping featurism. I think this is the case with Microsoft Office. With each new release the change how you access the old functions and and in a few more (useless) functions. When will the hurting stop?

Here

Well, since Mel is here, why not use

telnet host 80

Just so people know the definitions of certain words (although I do presume that most of the slashdot community are familiar with these):
script kiddies

hacker

cracker

Just so people know the definitions of certain words (although I do presume that most of the slashdot community are familiar with these):
script kiddies

hacker

cracker

Just so people know the definitions of certain words (although I do presume that most of the slashdot community are familiar with these):
script kiddies

hacker

cracker

Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately `UNIX' or `Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says that the `UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later, dmr tried to get the spelling changed to `Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers, on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is `UNIX', both capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses `Unix' in deference to dmr's wishes.

That's object files, not code. Code is what a developer writes. If a developer doesn't write it, it's not code; it's a build product.

That is your private terminology but not that of the field. The final phase of a compiler is called code generation and the result is code. Yes, code has multiple meanings and this is just one of them. For this reason, compiler writers (like me) prefer to speak about source text for the input of a compiler to distinguish it from the code which is the preferred term for the output of a compiler.

And if you don't believe me, look it up in the Jargon:

code n. The stuff that software writers write, either in source form or after translation by a compiler or assembler.

Walking drives! Even in computers, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Are you Mel by any chance?

• Same model as my first computer: Down from $2500 to a mere $20 or less.
• Book: Hardware interfacing for the (Apple, 8080, Z80, 6502, 6809, 8088, 8086, etc...): $2 on ebay or a computer show.
• Chips, resistors, led's, relays and everything else your heart desires: About ten seconds of salary apiece for salvage, $5 for the ones I can't live without.

• The freedom to try anything I want, 'cuz now I can afford to replace it if I let out the magic blue smoke?

  Priceless.

We're not all building Ham radios and grinding our own telescope lenses, but that's because we're so busy building our own aparatus for whatever interests us using the building blocks of the digital generation. 90% of my projects have nearly nothing to do with pre-1970's devices.

And when something DOES?-- well, ten seconds after I got my first Dobsonian 'scope, I began thinking how cool it'd be to rig it up with photocells, servos, a database and a real-time webserver so I could stargaze last night's sky any time I wanted (like at lunch!?). And two-thirds of how I'd do that isn't available from Edmunds. What's more, ten more seconds of searching on google (webcam astronomer) got me two such devices already implemented.

Folks are building their own fuel cells and hooking 'em to bikes, making wireless network antennas, turbocharged generators, stereo-to-PC integration devices, in-car-computers, personal VTOL aircraft, and more!

We're all still experimenting. That's what hacking is, in my book. We're just caught up in 'new' areas of discovery.

Oh, and Open Source has little to do with the urge to experiment. They may coincide, but either can live just fine exclusively of one another.

In simpler terms, Sun Tzu wrote:
"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."

(Oh, now I remember where I first saw this...)

Moore's Law. My GPU and CPU are both slower than current standards as well but I find them more than sufficient for Counter-Strike and Diablo2, so I see no point in upgrading except to have higher specs than the Geek Next Door.

Lately I have been feeling isolated while reading Slashdot. Not knowing all the common abbreviations and whatnot.

AFAIK (IANAL) ISTR TMTOWTDI. FWIW, YMMV; TIA.

First way

Second way

Third way

Here is a good starting page with some methods used for finding mines.

Is that you, Mel?

Why to argue this much? Guy, you lost due to Goldwin's Law.

See this URL for a more detailed explanation.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.

I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

So, you're wrong: the doubling period Moore initially predicted was 12 months; this held true for the 10 years that Moore originally estimated, and then dropped to 18 months not long afterward. The definition from the Jargon File:

Moore's Law /morzlaw/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months.

Yeah, I am rather suspicious of the whole thing, too. As Eddy Izzard says, "The infrastructure's fucked." (God: "Oh? Well, have some jam. And here's a radiator.")

It looks like Katz is the butt of someone's joke. Without some backing evidence (such as complete mail headers showing routes, and evidence that the headers aren't forged), I consider this a kremvax.

But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

And, if you read the FAQ, you'll find out that Netrek is exactly where the Ogg part came from. To quote:

An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:

3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."

(see the rest of the definition for the original Netrek usage.)

At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.

Pretty clear evidence that Netrek was the origin of the name.

If you were writing something like this today, it's a tossup whether the right language to use for the assembly portions would be the ugly but well-known and widely available Intel 8086 assemblers, or Java Bytecode which are a simpler model for a virtual machine.

Dragon Spice

SICP Spice

GOF Spice

K&R Spice

Knuth Spice

Dragon Spice

SICP Spice

GOF Spice

K&R Spice

Knuth Spice

Dragon Spice

SICP Spice

GOF Spice

K&R Spice

Knuth Spice

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Maybe Mel wrote the first gcc in hex in his head.

Just a couple of thoughts I had that might be helpful examples in the DeCSS case:

1) As far as an example of the use of source code, etc. as art, I am reminded of The Story of Mel. While to Mel, his programming style may not have necessarilly been intentionally artistic, it can easilly be seen as such now, just as Stonehenge or the Mandlebrot Set are forms of art.

2) Programming itself provides an excellent example of when unfettered access is necessary. An imperfect duplicate of a program is nearly always completely useless.

I hope this helps someone out. Good luck to everyone involved in the trial!

It sounds like a nice idea, but using a glove or a touchscreen for hours will kill your arm.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?"

--

Godwin's Law notwithstanding, that's just silly. I fully believe in the "never forget" aspect of remembering the Holocoust and fighting to avoid another one, but holding a corporation responsible for things done by the management of that corporation in a particular country, 50 years ago by not dealing with them in any way now is ridiculous.

Do you think that all Germans for the rest of human history should be punished? That we should never deal with them?

How about America, which was the home of the evil IBM corporation?

Remembering is one thing, but there is only so far you can punish groups for things done by tangentially related people far in the past.

-Puk the Jew

No, they've got to release source code.

Of course they must "release" the source code. But with respect to the NSA and the GPL a few things come to mind regarding your statement in particular, and the article in general.

First off, in the article, we read:

There's no way to hide a trap door in code that all can comment upon and analyze.

The distribution .tgz file contains no secret Trojan horse that reads the data on your hard disk and then sends it all back to Fort Meade.

Which brings me to your statement again:

No, they've got to release source code.

The choice of pig latin is an intresting one, though it would have not been mine. IMO, it would seem more logical to use something like rot 13. At least then, it would be easier to move to another "encryption" method (just increase or decrease the rotation factor -- this could even be done on the fly on a client level should someone figure work out the protocal issues).

All right. This discussion is over, due to invocation of Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
From the Jargon File

I know this won't work, since I'm invoking it directly, but I'm using this to make the case for generalizing Godwin's Law to cover weblogs such as /. and k5.

Shouldn't that be P and not D?
Whyzat?

C n. ... 3. The name of a programming language ... so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named `B' in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. [Before C++] there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'.

cheers,
mike