Re:Does it have Heinlein's extreme right-wing view
on
Altered Carbon
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· Score: 1
It was explained as being both moral and pragmatic.
It was moral because it was open to anyone. You weren't guaranteed to enjoy your assignment, but you were guaranteed to be capable of carrying it out.
It was pragmatic because anyone who served would be likely to care deeply about the government, and would be less likely to be swayed by empty political slogans. There was also some dialog speculating that the possible troublemakers were more likely to just serve and get the vote.
A simple google search answers this question. "Red Barchetta" was inspired by a SF story called "A Nice Morning Drive", and contains many SF trappings such as the "Motor Law", "alloy air-cars... two lanes wide" and hopping the "turbine freight".
steveha
Re:Does it have Heinlein's extreme right-wing view
on
Altered Carbon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Starship Troopers was indeed pro-military, but that was "the soldiers try to do a good job", not "the soldiers are the solution to every problem". In that novel, you were only a full citizen, with voting rights, after you had performed government service (which might or might not have been military). During your service you had no vote. So the government, which told the military what to do, had no active military people in it.
Note also that the heroes of Starship Troopers were the soldiers, not the generals.
Heinlein could easily have structured that society differently if he really were a "very right-wing" person. He could also have made it so that only military service got you the vote, or that the future society required universal military service of all people (like some countries do even today).
And you may feel that the Bugs were a thinly-veiled device to stand in for Communism, but I don't think so. A military novel needs to show the soldiers fighting someone and the Bugs made an interesting enemy. Besides, they raised an important theme: even though all of Earth was united under a peaceful government, it was not possible to disband the military; any society must always be prepared to defend itself.
You ought to read Expanded Universe sometime. There is a short essay in there (I think it was actually an introduction to one of the pieces) where Heinlein discussed ways to improve the government of America. One of his suggestions was to give the vote only to women. Another was to try out the solution in Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour".
It's like someone is trying to put so little in the message, that there is nothing to filter. If only they would use the stock "We are sending you this because you opted-in on it. Click on this link to remove your address." If they used that, I'll never see the message; SpamProbe will grab it. But how could I train SpamProbe to detect the minimalist ones, without blocking everything forever?
So far I don't get too many of the minimalist ones, and I just hit delete. If it becomes widespread, I'll have to start using Vipul's Razor or something.
The other kinds of spam that get past SpamProbe are the ones that have rampant misspellings. Since none of the words are in the database, they don't match as spam terms:
Subject: make moneey on EBAYxbbid
Want to make moneyzseqw? Click here...
I really think that I should write a filter that spell-checks an email, and rejects it if over 50% of the words with 5 or more letters are misspelled.
I wrote an article on how to set up SpamProbe on a server, and make it easy to train. You could also use Bogofilter or any other trainable spam filter, set up the same way.
I get at least 100 spam messages a day now, and I only see about a half-dozen or so. SpamProbe deals with the rest, and I don't have any problems with false positives. (SpamAssassin thinks that ads for LinuxWorld Expo are spam, but as I have it trained, SpamProbe doesn't.)
Instead the weekly news summary is filled with the joyous harmony of discussion on why certain liscences deserve to be punished for not being free enough.
You are looking at it the wrong way.
Debian is the distro that is completely free; you can give it to your friends, do anything you want with it. That's because the Debian guys are so annoyingly focussed on the licensing stuff.
In short, they care about it so you don't have to.
Is SCO Linux = a standardized UnitedLinux distro, or is it more complicated than that??
I wrote a review of SCO Linux 4.0 for Linux Journal magazine. I looked SCO Linux over quite carefully, and talked to SCO people about it.
SCO Linux 4.0 is United Linux 1.0, with just these differences: SCO's system information tool is included, and Webmin is set up for you (YaST is still there, but SCO recommends and supports Webmin).
SCO's system information tool is nice, but hardly essential (it's just a tool that puts together a file with information about your system such as kernel version, libc version, etc.) Webmin is nice, but you could easily install it yourself on a SuSE Linux system.
SCO Linux is almost completely a standard UnitedLinux system.
First of all, the P4 is quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive. So simulators, counters, anything that performs the same operation on multiple data sets time and time again run very well on the P4.
Especially true with RDRAM, which has tremendous throughput but horrible latency.
The classic example of something the P4 is very good at: encoding frames of video into a compressed format such as MPEG-2. It's just cranking away through a big heap of data in a linear fashion.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games,
Athlons do branch prediction, too. And they have a lower penalty for failure since their pipelines are shorter.
Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything more than once because it knows what to expect next, and preps the processor for it.
What?!? Um, actually, branch prediction just keeps the chip's pipeline full. Branch prediction doesn't magically adapt the P4 to process data better, it simply allows the P4 to keep pipelineing instructions after a conditional branch. When a prediction is wrong, it must be backed out, which is expensive... but most of the time the prediction is good. (For example, a loop that does something 1000 times will have a conditional branch that will branch the same way 1000 times in a row, and then branch the other way the 1001th time. The prediction would be wrong that 1001th time, but would be correct for most of the other 1000.)
especially those that are optimised for P4 use.
It is hardly surprising that a P4 would do better than an Athlon at running P4-optimized code. However, this isn't a useless point, because Intel is the 800-pound gorilla and there are games optimized for the P4, and none for Athlons.
But AMD isn't about innovation, they are about making money plain and simple. Instead of making engines that try to predict the next move, they just built their processors with the very minimum everything, strapped on a few extra math units and away we go. This technique is very fast, but it's also expensive as most AMD users have learned, because all those extra adders do is add a LOT of ambient heat as the processor clocks up.
Actually, if you check the Thermal Design Power specs for equivalent-peforming AMD and Intel chips, the AMD chips run cooler.
So the P4 was for the mainstream user, to help spare some time from the physics boundry of the processor technology, and to improve on the things we do most on our computers today (music, videos, games).
Pure revisionist history. The P4 was designed for super high clock rates. They ripped too much stuff out of the design, so the P4 has some bad weaknesses it didn't need to have. That's why it's so critical to optimize code specifically for the P4 -- if you don't work around the flaws in the P4, it really hurts.
The Athlon, while it gets more work done per clock than the P4, isn't perfect. Its biggest problem is that it is physically very easy to destroy: you can fry it, or you can even crack its die trying to install a heat sink. The P4 with its heat spreader is much tougher, and with its built-in thermal throttling is more robust. AMD has learned its lesson, though, and the Opteron is robust.
Intel has aggressively marketed the P4 as The Multimedia Chip, but really an Athlon or a P4 will do well for multimedia stuff. The Opteron, for some specific kinds of tasks, will crush either one, and for other kinds of tasks will be slightly faster. I'm just guessing -- I haven't run benchmarks -- but I suspect that the Opteron will do very well on chess.
Win4Lin's kernel patches are not binary only, they are patches. Debian isn't supported, officially, but it works; I have two computers running Debian with Win4Lin working on them.
You apply two patches: the "MKI adaptor" patch, which just adds a new interface to the kernel, and the Win4Lin kernel patch. I just built a 2.4.21 kernel last night with the 2.4.21 version of the Win4Lin kernel patch. No problems.
The only regrettable part with Win4Lin: it doesn't work with kernel preemption, or with the low-latency patches. I hate it when my Ogg music skips on playback, so I always ran the low-latency patches before I got Win4Lin. Now I can't.
If you want to build a custom kernel with Win4Lin support, go ahead and do it. As long as you don't have preemption or low-latency it should work.
I look forward to kernel 2.6.x, as I'm sure Win4Lin will be made to work with it (Netraverse does a good job of customer support) and 2.6.x will have huge improvements with respect to latency.
Programs seemed to crash more often in Win4Lin than in actual Windows. This may be fixed in 5.0.
I believe 5.0 does run some software that 4.0 didn't run. 5.0 runs just about all Windows "productivity" software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (the reason I bought Win4Lin for my wife's computer).
anything else (scanners, other USB toys, etc) are not. May be improved in 5.0.
The hardware support is the same as 4.0; in other words, still no USB.
You're very confused. This behaviour is absolutely nothing to do with stateful packet inspection. *ALL* routers will behave like this if you enable routing of all outbound traffic
The last time I looked at a cheap firewall/router that did not have stateful packet inspection, I seem to recall that it had most ports closed. That if you wanted to run some wacky program on some wacky port (your new game, for instance) that you would have to fire up the web browser, go to the admin form, and open the port. And then that port would be open. All the time.
So, I'm confused. Am I wrong about how the non-stateful firewall works?
Allowing all outbound traffic means that any trojans you get though e-mail/floppy/open HTTP port etc etc mean that the trojans can phone home
Dude, check my comment about "Of course, that cuts both ways". I know they can phone home. (But I think most trojans phone home through the HTTP port, so most firewalls will let them do it.)
The particular Netgear firewall you mentionned (FM114P/FR114P) is [...] probably the least stable and most annoying piece of hardware I've ever used.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've had good luck with my Netgear. In fact I haven't had any trouble with any Netgear stuff I have bought (and I can't say the same about Linksys).
I spent two years in a highschool cisco class, and in the 2 months before we started playing quake, I learned about network models. Basically, network operations can be divided into multiple layers, with each performing different functions. The layout of these devices seems to be based on one of these models, though I don't remember which. The stateful packet inspection you refer to would probably be part of the first device mentioned in the article, packet filters, which just operate on the network layer, not the other two.
I'm sure you are right. I saw them use the word "stateful" and sort of overlooked that they were talking about looking at several levels of the protocol, which no doubt accounts for the "expensive" and "difficult" comments.
The article is worth reading, but there was one comment that made me go "Huh?!?"
Stateful, multi-layer inspection firewalls [...] High level of cost, security and complexity
Pretty much all of Netgear's home routers have stateful packet inspection features. Some of them are quite inexpensive (how about US$80 for a model that even includes a print server!).
The great thing about stateful packet inspection is that you don't have to configure it. If you want to play some new game that does multiplayer play on the Internet through some wacky port, it will just work, and meanwhile if some random guy blasts packets at that port or any other they will bounce off. If you didn't ask for a packet, it gets turned away.
(If you ever serve as tech support for a friend or family member, be sure they buy a firewall/router with stateful packet inspection!)
Of course, that cuts both ways: any back-doors in your network will just work, also. Don't figure that just having a cool firewall/router with stateful packet inspection is a guarantee that you are secure. But it's a nice start, and it's what I recommend to anyone who has an always-on Internet connection.
we'll certainly be moving away from MPEG-2 when we move to HD DVD
Good point. I hope Theora 1.0 is finalized before HD DVD players become common, so there is some hope that all the HD DVD players will play Theora discs too.
Apple picked AAC-LC instead, even though they have to pay a fee, as part of their general support of MPEG-4.
Why, do you suppose? I'd guess two reasons:
0) They need to pay anyway, for QuickTime, and the added expense on top of that was considered small;
1) They liked the DRM options for AAC-LC.
Personally, I doubt Theora will get a lot of uptake by corporations. Its openness advantages are unlikely to overcome its disadvantages in maturity.
I'll be content if it just gets included onto lots of players. I don't feel a need to crush and destroy the other formats, but I would like to see a completely free format supported by all the popular players. If nothing else, it will keep the license terms reasonable among the non-free codecs. (I wonder if Apple threatened to use Vorbis for their music sales, to get a better licensing deal on AAC?)
You know the old saying: when life throws you a curve ball, make lemonade. Or something like that.
I think we all agree that we like multi-platform virus scanning. This just goes to show the biggest advantage of free software: no one can ever take it away from you.
If Microsoft decides to, they can terminate all versions of this product but the Windows versions. If we can get a really effective free alternative, that can never happen. (The very worst thing that can happen is slow updates to the virus definitions.)
I have always thought that anti-virus software was an ideal candidate for free software. Non-coders can easily contribute: whenever they find a virus that the scanner doesn't know, just send it in. (They can find the virus either by using a payware virus scanner, such as Norton Antivirus, or they can find it the hard way by getting it. However they find it, they can send it in.)
Heck, I'd be willing to keep one machine with Windows on it, running Norton, and also run the free scanner on it, just to help out the community.
So, is there a free virus scanner? Yes. Two, actually.
First came OpenAntiVirus. But that project's virus database was last modified in October 2002. The better alternative is ClamAV.
ClamAV is available for a whole bunch of platforms, including Linux and FreeBSD. It can be set up to scan mail on servers. There is a library you can use to add antivirus scanning to your own applications (maybe OpenOffice should do that?).
I hope that lots of people will start running ClamAV, even just as a test project. Remember that you can put ClamAV on as many computers as you want, for free, but you can still buy a few payware virus scanners to hedge your bets if you want to.
If lots of people run ClamAV, and send in viruses that it misses, it should be able to find all the viruses that the payware can find.
The article says that to configure an Airport, you need a Mac.
Really?
Every firewall/router I have used, including the ones that have 802.11b features, are configured using any web browser. Is it really true that Apple did something different, which requires a Mac?
You want lots of integration. Give it time; it will come. The free software world is made up of a bunch of unconnected projects; people add features on. One of these days, people will start adding the integration features. GNOME 2.x certainly has the plumbing for the sort of app-to-app communication you are wishing for; in fact, if you look at what the initials G-N-O-M-E stand for, it's the Network Object Model that will make this integration possible.
I would love to see a universal format. It needs to be rich enough to fully express a book: pictures, maps, small caps, everything. It should be compressed so the book can fit better on a PDA. It should be able to read books without putting a huge load on the relatively weak CPU of a PDA (this probably rules out PDF). And it needs to degrade gracefully: if a PDA chooses not to implement part of the standard, or if a new version of the standard comes out, the document reader software should be able to skip over the unknown parts of the document.
The best part about a standard format is that you would be able to choose your reader, where today you may not be able to. I love reading Baen ebooks (I have bought many more Baen ebooks than actual paperbacks in the past year) but I hate the MobiPocket reader that I must use for Baen ebooks. But Baen has few choices: simple DOC format isn't rich enough for their purposes, and if they use something else (such as iSilo) then users are just locked in to a different standard.
(Baen does offer mulitple formats, including RTF. I ought to see if iSilo offers a converter that can deal with RTF.)
steveha
Re:Why did Handspring split off in the first place
on
Palm to Buy Handspring
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· Score: 1
I still have and use my Visor Deluxe daily, although the screen's starting to go and it'll have to be replaced soon.
So get yourself a Visor Neo to replace it. If you check ebay, you will find you can get a Visor Deluxe for about $30, and a Visor Neo for probably $50 to $70 or so. If you really like it, get another.
I used the heck out of my Visor Deluxes. I bought a Visor Neo and used it for a while. But when I had a chance to get a Palm Tungsten T for a low price on eBay, I got it and I love it now. Compact, sturdy, and a great screen. And I love the speed.
Initially I was worried about battery life. You just have to make sure to plunk it in its cradle every few days to recharge it; it's not as big a deal as I was worried about.
If you do get a Tungsten T, be sure to get a good case to protect it. I have an E&B Slipper case and I love it.
I've never paid any money to this "Fraunhofer" fellow and I don't intend to start. How exactly would they force me to pay?
It would involve lawyers and a courtroom. First, they would have to care about you, and if you are just some random guy using MP3 they don't care about you. As soon as you start making enough money using MP3 they will care about you.
Or you could use Ogg Vorbis and no lawyers will try to collect money from you, even if you make a bunch of money.
My argument is that Vorbis support is cheap and pretty easy to add. Someone will add it. Eventually everyone will add it.
It's easiest on real computers. And guess what -- it's already there: WinAmp, iTunes, and XMMS can all play Vorbis-encoded files.
It's harder on portable devices, but it will happen there too. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, folks) is that any device with enough computer horsepower to decode Windows Media audio has enough horsepower to decode Vorbis. There are already portable devices that can play WMA. And the first portable to play Ogg, the Neuros, is on its way.
(That small band may not have to pay anything this year since the MP3 licensing authority waives the royalty for "entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00." But they could change the rules at any time. They own MP3 and they can charge whatever they want.)
So -- you can use MP3, and pay whatever Fraunhofer decides to charge you.
Or, you can use WMA, and pay whatever Microsoft decides to charge you.
Or, you can use Ogg, and pay $0.
Your choice.
It's nice that Vorbis is there. Even if few adopt it, it will keep Fraunhofer from jacking up the price of MP3 because they know they would just drive customers to Vorbis.
Industry needs to settle itself on a media, and MP3 seems to be acceptable.
You are thinking small.
Why can't all the cool new devices support MP3 -- and Ogg Vorbis? Ogg is very close to free: no license fees for Ogg, free reference sources for Ogg decoders (including Tremor, the integer-math only decoder), a little bit more ROM space used on the device. There are already devices that decode both MP3 and Windows Media audio files.
If you had a small band, and you wanted to sell compressed songs online, which would you rather use: MP3, where you will have to pay a minimum of $2000 per year, or Ogg Vorbis, where you will have to pay a maximum of $0? (That small band may not have to pay anything this year since the MP3 licensing authority waives the royalty for "entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00." But they could change the rules at any time. They own MP3 and they can charge whatever they want.)
People had to choose between VHS and Betamax because it is not possible to make a device that can play both. (Well, you could, but it would be large and expensive so few would buy it.) Ogg Vorbis may become huge overnight, or it may be a niche product forever, but the costs of rolling it out are so small that it will happen.
Slashdot Mirror
It was explained as being both moral and pragmatic.
It was moral because it was open to anyone. You weren't guaranteed to enjoy your assignment, but you were guaranteed to be capable of carrying it out.
It was pragmatic because anyone who served would be likely to care deeply about the government, and would be less likely to be swayed by empty political slogans. There was also some dialog speculating that the possible troublemakers were more likely to just serve and get the vote.
steveha
A simple google search answers this question. "Red Barchetta" was inspired by a SF story called "A Nice Morning Drive", and contains many SF trappings such as the "Motor Law", "alloy air-cars... two lanes wide" and hopping the "turbine freight".
steveha
Starship Troopers was indeed pro-military, but that was "the soldiers try to do a good job", not "the soldiers are the solution to every problem". In that novel, you were only a full citizen, with voting rights, after you had performed government service (which might or might not have been military). During your service you had no vote. So the government, which told the military what to do, had no active military people in it.
Note also that the heroes of Starship Troopers were the soldiers, not the generals.
Heinlein could easily have structured that society differently if he really were a "very right-wing" person. He could also have made it so that only military service got you the vote, or that the future society required universal military service of all people (like some countries do even today).
And you may feel that the Bugs were a thinly-veiled device to stand in for Communism, but I don't think so. A military novel needs to show the soldiers fighting someone and the Bugs made an interesting enemy. Besides, they raised an important theme: even though all of Earth was united under a peaceful government, it was not possible to disband the military; any society must always be prepared to defend itself.
You ought to read Expanded Universe sometime. There is a short essay in there (I think it was actually an introduction to one of the pieces) where Heinlein discussed ways to improve the government of America. One of his suggestions was to give the vote only to women. Another was to try out the solution in Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour".
Heinlein was more a libertarian than right-wing.
steveha
Much of the spam that gets past it is so minimalist it cannot be blocked by a Bayesian filter. I get messages like this:
It's like someone is trying to put so little in the message, that there is nothing to filter. If only they would use the stock "We are sending you this because you opted-in on it. Click on this link to remove your address." If they used that, I'll never see the message; SpamProbe will grab it. But how could I train SpamProbe to detect the minimalist ones, without blocking everything forever?
So far I don't get too many of the minimalist ones, and I just hit delete. If it becomes widespread, I'll have to start using Vipul's Razor or something.
The other kinds of spam that get past SpamProbe are the ones that have rampant misspellings. Since none of the words are in the database, they don't match as spam terms:
I really think that I should write a filter that spell-checks an email, and rejects it if over 50% of the words with 5 or more letters are misspelled.
steveha
I wrote an article on how to set up SpamProbe on a server, and make it easy to train. You could also use Bogofilter or any other trainable spam filter, set up the same way.
I get at least 100 spam messages a day now, and I only see about a half-dozen or so. SpamProbe deals with the rest, and I don't have any problems with false positives. (SpamAssassin thinks that ads for LinuxWorld Expo are spam, but as I have it trained, SpamProbe doesn't.)
steveha
Instead the weekly news summary is filled with the joyous harmony of discussion on why certain liscences deserve to be punished for not being free enough.
You are looking at it the wrong way.
Debian is the distro that is completely free; you can give it to your friends, do anything you want with it. That's because the Debian guys are so annoyingly focussed on the licensing stuff.
In short, they care about it so you don't have to.
steveha
Is SCO Linux = a standardized UnitedLinux distro, or is it more complicated than that??
I wrote a review of SCO Linux 4.0 for Linux Journal magazine. I looked SCO Linux over quite carefully, and talked to SCO people about it.
SCO Linux 4.0 is United Linux 1.0, with just these differences: SCO's system information tool is included, and Webmin is set up for you (YaST is still there, but SCO recommends and supports Webmin).
SCO's system information tool is nice, but hardly essential (it's just a tool that puts together a file with information about your system such as kernel version, libc version, etc.) Webmin is nice, but you could easily install it yourself on a SuSE Linux system.
SCO Linux is almost completely a standard UnitedLinux system.
steveha
First of all, the P4 is quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive. So simulators, counters, anything that performs the same operation on multiple data sets time and time again run very well on the P4.
Especially true with RDRAM, which has tremendous throughput but horrible latency.
The classic example of something the P4 is very good at: encoding frames of video into a compressed format such as MPEG-2. It's just cranking away through a big heap of data in a linear fashion.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games,
Athlons do branch prediction, too. And they have a lower penalty for failure since their pipelines are shorter.
Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything more than once because it knows what to expect next, and preps the processor for it.
What?!? Um, actually, branch prediction just keeps the chip's pipeline full. Branch prediction doesn't magically adapt the P4 to process data better, it simply allows the P4 to keep pipelineing instructions after a conditional branch. When a prediction is wrong, it must be backed out, which is expensive... but most of the time the prediction is good. (For example, a loop that does something 1000 times will have a conditional branch that will branch the same way 1000 times in a row, and then branch the other way the 1001th time. The prediction would be wrong that 1001th time, but would be correct for most of the other 1000.)
especially those that are optimised for P4 use.
It is hardly surprising that a P4 would do better than an Athlon at running P4-optimized code. However, this isn't a useless point, because Intel is the 800-pound gorilla and there are games optimized for the P4, and none for Athlons.
But AMD isn't about innovation, they are about making money plain and simple. Instead of making engines that try to predict the next move, they just built their processors with the very minimum everything, strapped on a few extra math units and away we go. This technique is very fast, but it's also expensive as most AMD users have learned, because all those extra adders do is add a LOT of ambient heat as the processor clocks up.
Actually, if you check the Thermal Design Power specs for equivalent-peforming AMD and Intel chips, the AMD chips run cooler.
So the P4 was for the mainstream user, to help spare some time from the physics boundry of the processor technology, and to improve on the things we do most on our computers today (music, videos, games).
Pure revisionist history. The P4 was designed for super high clock rates. They ripped too much stuff out of the design, so the P4 has some bad weaknesses it didn't need to have. That's why it's so critical to optimize code specifically for the P4 -- if you don't work around the flaws in the P4, it really hurts.
The Athlon, while it gets more work done per clock than the P4, isn't perfect. Its biggest problem is that it is physically very easy to destroy: you can fry it, or you can even crack its die trying to install a heat sink. The P4 with its heat spreader is much tougher, and with its built-in thermal throttling is more robust. AMD has learned its lesson, though, and the Opteron is robust.
Intel has aggressively marketed the P4 as The Multimedia Chip, but really an Athlon or a P4 will do well for multimedia stuff. The Opteron, for some specific kinds of tasks, will crush either one, and for other kinds of tasks will be slightly faster. I'm just guessing -- I haven't run benchmarks -- but I suspect that the Opteron will do very well on chess.
steveha
You are mistaken!
Win4Lin's kernel patches are not binary only, they are patches. Debian isn't supported, officially, but it works; I have two computers running Debian with Win4Lin working on them.
You apply two patches: the "MKI adaptor" patch, which just adds a new interface to the kernel, and the Win4Lin kernel patch. I just built a 2.4.21 kernel last night with the 2.4.21 version of the Win4Lin kernel patch. No problems.
The only regrettable part with Win4Lin: it doesn't work with kernel preemption, or with the low-latency patches. I hate it when my Ogg music skips on playback, so I always ran the low-latency patches before I got Win4Lin. Now I can't.
If you want to build a custom kernel with Win4Lin support, go ahead and do it. As long as you don't have preemption or low-latency it should work.
I look forward to kernel 2.6.x, as I'm sure Win4Lin will be made to work with it (Netraverse does a good job of customer support) and 2.6.x will have huge improvements with respect to latency.
steveha
Programs seemed to crash more often in Win4Lin than in actual Windows. This may be fixed in 5.0.
I believe 5.0 does run some software that 4.0 didn't run. 5.0 runs just about all Windows "productivity" software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (the reason I bought Win4Lin for my wife's computer).
anything else (scanners, other USB toys, etc) are not. May be improved in 5.0.
The hardware support is the same as 4.0; in other words, still no USB.
It's still useful, though. And FAST.
steveha
It's sad really that this is the reason they will will, not because they are in the right or anything...
It is possible to be in the wrong, and win just because you can afford the lawyers. But it really does help to be in the right.
IBM is in the right and has legions of lawyers. I don't doubt the outcome for a moment.
steveha
You're very confused. This behaviour is absolutely nothing to do with stateful packet inspection. *ALL* routers will behave like this if you enable routing of all outbound traffic
The last time I looked at a cheap firewall/router that did not have stateful packet inspection, I seem to recall that it had most ports closed. That if you wanted to run some wacky program on some wacky port (your new game, for instance) that you would have to fire up the web browser, go to the admin form, and open the port. And then that port would be open. All the time.
So, I'm confused. Am I wrong about how the non-stateful firewall works?
Allowing all outbound traffic means that any trojans you get though e-mail/floppy/open HTTP port etc etc mean that the trojans can phone home
Dude, check my comment about "Of course, that cuts both ways". I know they can phone home. (But I think most trojans phone home through the HTTP port, so most firewalls will let them do it.)
The particular Netgear firewall you mentionned (FM114P/FR114P) is [...] probably the least stable and most annoying piece of hardware I've ever used.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've had good luck with my Netgear. In fact I haven't had any trouble with any Netgear stuff I have bought (and I can't say the same about Linksys).
I haven't tested that particular model, however.
steveha
I spent two years in a highschool cisco class, and in the 2 months before we started playing quake, I learned about network models. Basically, network operations can be divided into multiple layers, with each performing different functions. The layout of these devices seems to be based on one of these models, though I don't remember which. The stateful packet inspection you refer to would probably be part of the first device mentioned in the article, packet filters, which just operate on the network layer, not the other two.
I'm sure you are right. I saw them use the word "stateful" and sort of overlooked that they were talking about looking at several levels of the protocol, which no doubt accounts for the "expensive" and "difficult" comments.
steveha
Pretty much all of Netgear's home routers have stateful packet inspection features. Some of them are quite inexpensive (how about US$80 for a model that even includes a print server!).
The great thing about stateful packet inspection is that you don't have to configure it. If you want to play some new game that does multiplayer play on the Internet through some wacky port, it will just work, and meanwhile if some random guy blasts packets at that port or any other they will bounce off. If you didn't ask for a packet, it gets turned away.
(If you ever serve as tech support for a friend or family member, be sure they buy a firewall/router with stateful packet inspection!)
Of course, that cuts both ways: any back-doors in your network will just work, also. Don't figure that just having a cool firewall/router with stateful packet inspection is a guarantee that you are secure. But it's a nice start, and it's what I recommend to anyone who has an always-on Internet connection.
steveha
we'll certainly be moving away from MPEG-2 when we move to HD DVD
Good point. I hope Theora 1.0 is finalized before HD DVD players become common, so there is some hope that all the HD DVD players will play Theora discs too.
Apple picked AAC-LC instead, even though they have to pay a fee, as part of their general support of MPEG-4.
Why, do you suppose? I'd guess two reasons:
0) They need to pay anyway, for QuickTime, and the added expense on top of that was considered small;
1) They liked the DRM options for AAC-LC.
Personally, I doubt Theora will get a lot of uptake by corporations. Its openness advantages are unlikely to overcome its disadvantages in maturity.
I'll be content if it just gets included onto lots of players. I don't feel a need to crush and destroy the other formats, but I would like to see a completely free format supported by all the popular players. If nothing else, it will keep the license terms reasonable among the non-free codecs. (I wonder if Apple threatened to use Vorbis for their music sales, to get a better licensing deal on AAC?)
steveha
Windows Media 9 is free-as-in-beer for most uses, and is today a lot better than Theora could possibly be in a year.
However, in a year, with Theora be Good Enough?
I don't need the absolute best. Will Theora be good enough in the important ways that companies might use it?
I'm hoping Theora can conquer the world, because it will always be more convenient to play Theora files than Windows Media files on Linux.
Also: for most purposes, MPEG2 is clearly Good Enough. Will Theora version 1.0 be comprable to or better than MPEG2?
steveha
You know the old saying: when life throws you a curve ball, make lemonade. Or something like that.
I think we all agree that we like multi-platform virus scanning. This just goes to show the biggest advantage of free software: no one can ever take it away from you.
If Microsoft decides to, they can terminate all versions of this product but the Windows versions. If we can get a really effective free alternative, that can never happen. (The very worst thing that can happen is slow updates to the virus definitions.)
I have always thought that anti-virus software was an ideal candidate for free software. Non-coders can easily contribute: whenever they find a virus that the scanner doesn't know, just send it in. (They can find the virus either by using a payware virus scanner, such as Norton Antivirus, or they can find it the hard way by getting it. However they find it, they can send it in.)
Heck, I'd be willing to keep one machine with Windows on it, running Norton, and also run the free scanner on it, just to help out the community.
So, is there a free virus scanner? Yes. Two, actually.
First came OpenAntiVirus. But that project's virus database was last modified in October 2002. The better alternative is ClamAV.
ClamAV is available for a whole bunch of platforms, including Linux and FreeBSD. It can be set up to scan mail on servers. There is a library you can use to add antivirus scanning to your own applications (maybe OpenOffice should do that?).
I hope that lots of people will start running ClamAV, even just as a test project. Remember that you can put ClamAV on as many computers as you want, for free, but you can still buy a few payware virus scanners to hedge your bets if you want to.
If lots of people run ClamAV, and send in viruses that it misses, it should be able to find all the viruses that the payware can find.
steveha
The article says that to configure an Airport, you need a Mac.
Really?
Every firewall/router I have used, including the ones that have 802.11b features, are configured using any web browser. Is it really true that Apple did something different, which requires a Mac?
If so: I suggest you buy a Netgear instead.
steveha
You want lots of integration. Give it time; it will come. The free software world is made up of a bunch of unconnected projects; people add features on. One of these days, people will start adding the integration features. GNOME 2.x certainly has the plumbing for the sort of app-to-app communication you are wishing for; in fact, if you look at what the initials G-N-O-M-E stand for, it's the Network Object Model that will make this integration possible.
Read Miguel's famous rant "Let's Make UNIX not Suck".
As for how to train bogofilter which emails are spam, may I humbly recommend you read my own article on the Linux Journal web site:
Fight Spam with SpamProbe
I used SpamProbe but you can use the same approach to use BogoFilter.
steveha
I would love to see a universal format. It needs to be rich enough to fully express a book: pictures, maps, small caps, everything. It should be compressed so the book can fit better on a PDA. It should be able to read books without putting a huge load on the relatively weak CPU of a PDA (this probably rules out PDF). And it needs to degrade gracefully: if a PDA chooses not to implement part of the standard, or if a new version of the standard comes out, the document reader software should be able to skip over the unknown parts of the document.
The best part about a standard format is that you would be able to choose your reader, where today you may not be able to. I love reading Baen ebooks (I have bought many more Baen ebooks than actual paperbacks in the past year) but I hate the MobiPocket reader that I must use for Baen ebooks. But Baen has few choices: simple DOC format isn't rich enough for their purposes, and if they use something else (such as iSilo) then users are just locked in to a different standard.
(Baen does offer mulitple formats, including RTF. I ought to see if iSilo offers a converter that can deal with RTF.)
steveha
I still have and use my Visor Deluxe daily, although the screen's starting to go and it'll have to be replaced soon.
So get yourself a Visor Neo to replace it. If you check ebay, you will find you can get a Visor Deluxe for about $30, and a Visor Neo for probably $50 to $70 or so. If you really like it, get another.
I used the heck out of my Visor Deluxes. I bought a Visor Neo and used it for a while. But when I had a chance to get a Palm Tungsten T for a low price on eBay, I got it and I love it now. Compact, sturdy, and a great screen. And I love the speed.
Initially I was worried about battery life. You just have to make sure to plunk it in its cradle every few days to recharge it; it's not as big a deal as I was worried about.
If you do get a Tungsten T, be sure to get a good case to protect it. I have an E&B Slipper case and I love it.
steveha
I've never paid any money to this "Fraunhofer" fellow and I don't intend to start. How exactly would they force me to pay?
It would involve lawyers and a courtroom. First, they would have to care about you, and if you are just some random guy using MP3 they don't care about you. As soon as you start making enough money using MP3 they will care about you.
Or you could use Ogg Vorbis and no lawyers will try to collect money from you, even if you make a bunch of money.
steveha
your argument is:
My argument is that Vorbis support is cheap and pretty easy to add. Someone will add it. Eventually everyone will add it.
It's easiest on real computers. And guess what -- it's already there: WinAmp, iTunes, and XMMS can all play Vorbis-encoded files.
It's harder on portable devices, but it will happen there too. My understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, folks) is that any device with enough computer horsepower to decode Windows Media audio has enough horsepower to decode Vorbis. There are already portable devices that can play WMA. And the first portable to play Ogg, the Neuros, is on its way.
steveha
Sure I did. Did you read what I wrote?
So -- you can use MP3, and pay whatever Fraunhofer decides to charge you.
Or, you can use WMA, and pay whatever Microsoft decides to charge you.
Or, you can use Ogg, and pay $0.
Your choice.
It's nice that Vorbis is there. Even if few adopt it, it will keep Fraunhofer from jacking up the price of MP3 because they know they would just drive customers to Vorbis.
steveha
Industry needs to settle itself on a media, and MP3 seems to be acceptable.
You are thinking small.
Why can't all the cool new devices support MP3 -- and Ogg Vorbis? Ogg is very close to free: no license fees for Ogg, free reference sources for Ogg decoders (including Tremor, the integer-math only decoder), a little bit more ROM space used on the device. There are already devices that decode both MP3 and Windows Media audio files.
If you had a small band, and you wanted to sell compressed songs online, which would you rather use: MP3, where you will have to pay a minimum of $2000 per year, or Ogg Vorbis, where you will have to pay a maximum of $0? (That small band may not have to pay anything this year since the MP3 licensing authority waives the royalty for "entities with an annual gross revenue less than US$ 100 000.00." But they could change the rules at any time. They own MP3 and they can charge whatever they want.)
People had to choose between VHS and Betamax because it is not possible to make a device that can play both. (Well, you could, but it would be large and expensive so few would buy it.) Ogg Vorbis may become huge overnight, or it may be a niche product forever, but the costs of rolling it out are so small that it will happen.
steveha