I have a Lexmark color laser printer too. It's a C522N. It worked out of the box with Linux - no special drivers required. In fact it works with everything - it accepts PDF and Postscript and just prints them - no trouble, nice quality. It works with CUPS, and correctly tells my desktop when there's a problem like no paper.
It was cheap too, and is now a few years old - but it has newer successors in the same range.
As mine was so cheap, I don't understand why anybody would buy the versions which need special drivers.
From that uname output, it sounds like it might be a Sigma Designs chip, perhaps 8634? Sigma Designs themselves do ship their modified source code to the GPL parts: Busybox, kernel, etc., to downstream product developers. (Let us ignore the "binary driver includes blob of opaque code wrapped in simple kernel ioctls" issue).
That source includes a note to the effect that they confirm it is covered by the GPL.
Therefore, the product developers (possibly Minerva) should have no difficulty passing it on to you.
See Popcorn Hour for another company who are possibly using the same chip, and might be more helpful about providing that code - if only to prove to Minerva that it is possible.
As you say, continuation-based. Those are examples of proper use of sessions. Thus refuting all your objections.
All decent frameworks don't break the back button, allow parallel surfing and can have long timeouts. (Otherwise they aren't decent by definition:-)
For many progressive form-filling applications, you don't want to be passing the whole state in a form because of security: you may well have state used to build the page which should not be user modifiable. Sure, you can validate all inputs. But it's better to have strong type safety and not have to validate all inputs.
And size: you may have large state (continuations, for example, are large state:-). Temporary video files prior to "submit" at the end of a series of pages would be large state best kept on the server, to pick an extreme example:-)
Did I mention you want to use GET so that your back button works without warnings - as you seem to like the back button:-) Three reasons to use session identifies instead of raw state with GET: size (URL limits in common servers), meaningful URLs, and not revealing private user information in URL history and the address bar.
On the other hand, for things like search forms, blogs and such, of course there's no point having server-side session state, and it's better to make portable bookmarks.
Not always. Sometimes, by the profits of other activities by the company - perhaps even activities free software advocates would regard as ethical.
If not directly, then indirectly, as a service company for another company.
This is the pay-to-create-software-to-get-something-done model, instead of make-first-license-later. Both are business models. The former works with software whose distribution is not restricted after it's created. A lot of software really is created that way.
The only state most apps need to send to the server are a "session" value (cookie or form) and any data you entered. Complex page state is kept on the server, in a session-associated database. If requests are sending a little more, no harm. If they're sending a lot of data every time, which isn't user-entered on that specific page, they're not very well coded.
The real excessive state transfer is the repeated sending of large quantities of (X)HTML from server to client. AJAX helps with that.
To address this issue in Windows Vista, we implemented TCP auto-tuning. It enables TCP window scaling by default and automatically tunes the TCP receive window size based on the bandwidth delay product (BDP) and the rate at which the application reads data from the connection. With TCP auto-tuning, we have seen 1000% (10x) throughput improvements in internal testing over underutilized wide-area network links.
Downlink bandwidth can be controlled in numerous ways. The easiest way is to actually run the incoming packets through a bandwidth limiter with a very large packet queuing capability. This will cause a ton of packets to build up in front of the limiter and eventually fill the TCP windows of the senders. The packets that get through the limiter will cause a stream of ACKs back from your machines at the desired data rate. The combination of the two will cause the remote senders to band-limit the packets they send to the bandwidth you desire.
A problem with that is modern endpoint TCPs will detect your queue, and enlarge their windows to compensate because they see it as unused network capacity. They can't distinguish your device from, e.g. a satellite link where they should keep lots of data in flight. So your device and the endpoints will compete to see who can use the most RAM.
50 seconds per TB to mount? Tsk, you can do better than that...:-) What are you doing which is taking so much time?
Logfs gets almost exactly the same mount rate, btw. Granted, Logfs is presently limited to 4GiB because linux-mtd is, and it doesn't do RAID etc. or a lot of other things that yours does.
It would have to be fast for that kind of money. $20,000 for 1TB? A 1TB hard disk costs $200.
Granted, I'm sure you're right and it probably is that fast. There's certainly a niche for it.
(I have some relevant curiosity as I'm developing a database engine.)
Your license seems rather expensive, but I'm not one of your customers. Still, it's a motivator for other developers to undercut you.
From your basic description, it seems likely that UBI + BLKUBI (block driver over UBI) may give similar functionality to what you described but without the performance, because BLKUBI doesn't group 4k writes consecutively. (There are people using that combination in some embedded products in development now.)
However, UBIFS + loop mount, or LogFS + loop mount, might get close in performance. Both of those present a block device which can be used by any filesystem, but underneath translate to a logged tree-structured filesystem.
UBI is too slow at mounting huge drives, but LogFS is good for that.
Does your system offer a significant difference from UBIFS/LogFS (containing a single file) + loop mount?
I suspect BTRFS (similar to ZFS) will start getting good at this eventually. It's not aimed at flash right now, but it's a natural direction for a log-tree-structured filesystem to go in when SSDs become more popular. And it has better RAID than drive-level RAID in many ways.
In Linux the LogFS options are really tuned for small memory small storage systems and for hardware where the flash chips are directly accessible. They do help drive wear a lot, but they are just not tuned for Gigabytes of space or database crunching performance.
Corrections: There are Linux log filesystems tuned for gigabytes of flash now. Look up UBIFS and logfs. There is also a variant, I think of YAFFS, used by some database engine.
The point you quoted, however, is response specifically to "A 15 year old is not a "kid" anymore. They are, as far as physical characteristics are concerned, normal "woman" with breast and everything us guys like. I would not call this pedophilia."
In my opinion, sex with a 15 year old girl is not wrong if she's fine with it. You can say a 15 year old girl is not "mentally capable" of making such a decision. If you did, I would disagree except to acknowledge that more people are able to make such a decision wisely the older they get, and the age of the other person involved is also a factor.
Therefore it is wrong to automatically declare sex with a 15 year old girl rape. First, one should enquire whether she consented and was in a fit state to consent.
On the other hand, a father / step-father / uncle having sex with their 15 year old close relative is virtually always not with consent. It is hardly appropriate to ask the girl politely whether it was: there is near certainty that if she says yes, that too is the result of coercive factors. And furthermore, even in the rare cases where it is genuine consent, there is so much abuse of this kind in present society, and it is so harmful in most cases, that it must be strongly discouraged by being a crime.
Thus the point is that "a 15-year old is not a kid anymore" is valid (in my opinion) when considering the age of consent. But it is not valid in response to "Wikipedia suggests 20%-25% of women and 5-15% of men in the US experienced some form of sexual abuse as children" - the latter is about sexual abuse specifically, not about sex below the age of consent as such.
That's why I mean about this specific sub-thread conflating two issues. Some people think talk of sex with underage teenagers is the same thing as talk of sexual abuse; it is not, and the difference is very important.
And, you are right to point out sexual abuse happens to adults too. I would like to remind anyone still reading that it happens to boys and men too, and is perpetrated by women and girls too. Things people forget sometimes.
A 15 year old is not a "kid" anymore. They are, as far as physical characteristics are concerned, normal "woman" with breast and everything us guys like. I would not call this pedophilia.
No, but it is abuse if it's her father touching her up and she doesn't want it.
This sub-thread has confused sexual abuse of teenagers with abuse of children.
Unfortunately the formal law does the same. This shows a blatant inability to make rational law in this area.
You missed the point. Pedophiles do not have sex children.
Only rapist pedophiles do that, to use the GP's terminology.
Therefore it is wrong to demonise pedophiles who are not rapists. They haven't done anything.
As the GP says, current society treats all pedophiles like criminals regardless of actual behaviour, but the majority of pedophiles have never committed any crime, nor harmed anyone, nor will they ever.
Most of them don't look at porn either. Just like everyone else.
The user interface sure isn't much to write about, but it's ability to basically play video files and play them well is better than Totem, Xine and even Mplayer in my experience - and also quite a lot better than the proprietary software/hardware set-top box combination that I work with.
So I would say it's video playback is very good and that is a certain kind of maturity, but it's user interface (and as others have said, subtitle support) are not.
VLC also does unusual things - that it was the original point of VLC:-) - namely transcoding and broadcasting/streaming video.
Time to store your important data as encrypted dot patterns on paper? You can get quite a good information density. That would make an interesting court case.
What is the difference between copying a friend's CD and downloading music?
* It is only legal to copy a friend's CD
* It is legal to download the song
* They are both legal
* They are both illegal
I copy a friend's CD and download music *legally* quite often.
Copying a CD of music written and played by my friend, who told me it's cool. That's legal.
Copying GNU/Linux CDs is legal too.
Internet radio, podcasts, Magnatunes, Jamendo, anything else under Creative Commons, any of countless freely offered music downloads from the pros, promotional tracks on web sites, previews... They are all legal to download.
Music I purchase online is also downloading music... and of course legal.
What was the correct answer again?
The correct answer is learn that it's good to lie, to give the answer authority insists on hearing, rather than the plain facts.
Governments decide between the $203 proprietary version (XP) and the $207 source-available version (XP+GNU/Linux) purchased in lots of 1M. They'll see no advantage to choosing the more expensive version.
They could buy both to pass the choice to their citizens, but as most citizens don't mind which UI they use, don't need the source, and are poor, it makes no sense for the government to spend $4M per lot just for a mere _option_ which most people won't use.
Therefore, individual kids, parents and teachers may not have the choice, even when they can afford the extra $4. XP version or no laptop at all.
This is because the OLPC is not sold as individual customised items (like Dell), but in large uniform batches through governments. And we know how much poor governments love spend extra money on giving individuals lots of choice in public services.
Choice in one place may not always lead to choice where it matters.
It's supposed to be finite from the point of view of outside observers. Material processes approaching the event horizon appear to slow down, but are also distorted and crushed and those effects will change their form.
Some of the consequences are simple physics: X-rays due to accelerating orbits, gases heating as they are compressed in the gravity well and so on.
Being ripped to unrecognizable form (perhaps strings, perhaps something unknown) at the event horizon and being radiated as Hawking radiation, which can be seen as quantum tunnelling through limitations of an event horizon, is the extreme end of that, and the time from material approach to Hawking radiation happens a finite time after approaching the hole, as measured by observers outside the hole.
The bit about information preservation says that the approaching matter's information is still present in the emitted Hawking radiation somehow. It's pretty scrambled, and that includes thorough mixing with other information that's entered the hole, so it looks random, but that doesn't rule out there being some aspect of it which is usefully non-random. In particular, certain aspects of quantum information are preserved.
The experience of time and space are quite different to observers who enter the hole, as compared with observers outside the hole who (patiently) watch their friends go in and measure the information which was their friends be radiated out. All sorts of interesting questions arise about consciousness, personal timelines, personal realities.
Nice. From the screenshots of the link, it looks very similar to Ubuntu's default Gtk theme, Human, except the icons are more systematic, less colourful and cartoonish, and slightly more space around (all typical of Gnome vs. KDE). I think I still prefer Human+Gnome - it's always been the unsubtle icons which put me off KDE visually. Much like the difference between TeX and Word: the latter is easier to do fun stuff, but scruffy. I wouldn't apply that to the Qt widget set though: QtCurve looks great and just the right level of subtlety. I wouldn't be surprised if QtCurve came first and was mimicked to make Human.
You can, and I recommend it. An app I was involved with switched from WinForms to Gtk# on Windows because Winforms just isn't that good. It was a great improvement.
I understand that Winforms 2 is catching up with Gtk and every other toolkit though: it does widget layout for you now! (wow!) (sarcasm).
You're right, those sorts of systems wouldn't fit the definitions of dataflow programming. I wouldn't call all of them non-algorithmic - cellular automata can be highly representative of an algorithm and constructed specifically for one.
Although I agree that the name 'control flow programming' isn't very nice, I like the idea it invokes for me that the control relationships move with the data, and in a way which is not predetermined by a static control structure (i.e. a classical algorithm). I believe you can take this further, intertwining the control and data structures such that they are indistinguishable and flow, with the substrate governing the flow but not necessarily the computation.
These ideas are old in sci-fi, but I'm not aware of them being used in real devices to any notable extent. I have occasionally considered doing a PhD on exactly this topic - what a nice coincidence:-)
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If it supports the current version of PostScript, then it does support PDF natively.
I have a Lexmark color laser printer too. It's a C522N. It worked out of the box with Linux - no special drivers required. In fact it works with everything - it accepts PDF and Postscript and just prints them - no trouble, nice quality. It works with CUPS, and correctly tells my desktop when there's a problem like no paper.
It was cheap too, and is now a few years old - but it has newer successors in the same range.
As mine was so cheap, I don't understand why anybody would buy the versions which need special drivers.
I highly recommend this printer for Linux use.
From that uname output, it sounds like it might be a Sigma Designs chip, perhaps 8634? Sigma Designs themselves do ship their modified source code to the GPL parts: Busybox, kernel, etc., to downstream product developers. (Let us ignore the "binary driver includes blob of opaque code wrapped in simple kernel ioctls" issue).
That source includes a note to the effect that they confirm it is covered by the GPL.
Therefore, the product developers (possibly Minerva) should have no difficulty passing it on to you.
See Popcorn Hour for another company who are possibly using the same chip, and might be more helpful about providing that code - if only to prove to Minerva that it is possible.
As you say, continuation-based. Those are examples of proper use of sessions. Thus refuting all your objections.
:-)
:-). Temporary video files prior to "submit" at the end of a series of pages would be large state best kept on the server, to pick an extreme example :-)
:-) Three reasons to use session identifies instead of raw state with GET: size (URL limits in common servers), meaningful URLs, and not revealing private user information in URL history and the address bar.
All decent frameworks don't break the back button, allow parallel surfing and can have long timeouts. (Otherwise they aren't decent by definition
For many progressive form-filling applications, you don't want to be passing the whole state in a form because of security: you may well have state used to build the page which should not be user modifiable. Sure, you can validate all inputs. But it's better to have strong type safety and not have to validate all inputs.
And size: you may have large state (continuations, for example, are large state
Did I mention you want to use GET so that your back button works without warnings - as you seem to like the back button
On the other hand, for things like search forms, blogs and such, of course there's no point having server-side session state, and it's better to make portable bookmarks.
Not always. Sometimes, by the profits of other activities by the company - perhaps even activities free software advocates would regard as ethical.
If not directly, then indirectly, as a service company for another company.
This is the pay-to-create-software-to-get-something-done model, instead of make-first-license-later. Both are business models. The former works with software whose distribution is not restricted after it's created. A lot of software really is created that way.
They mean free as in freedom, not price. Some of this software costs a lot of real money to develop.
If you think "free software" cannot pay salaries, look again: there are lots of programmers paid to work on free software full time right now.
They aren't the majority, but there are quite a few.
The only state most apps need to send to the server are a "session" value (cookie or form) and any data you entered. Complex page state is kept on the server, in a session-associated database. If requests are sending a little more, no harm. If they're sending a lot of data every time, which isn't user-entered on that specific page, they're not very well coded.
The real excessive state transfer is the repeated sending of large quantities of (X)HTML from server to client. AJAX helps with that.
http://blogs.msdn.com/wndp/archive/2006/05/05/Winhec-blog-tcpip-2.aspx
A problem with that is modern endpoint TCPs will detect your queue, and enlarge their windows to compensate because they see it as unused network capacity. They can't distinguish your device from, e.g. a satellite link where they should keep lots of data in flight. So your device and the endpoints will compete to see who can use the most RAM.
50 seconds per TB to mount? Tsk, you can do better than that... :-) What are you doing which is taking so much time?
Logfs gets almost exactly the same mount rate, btw. Granted, Logfs is presently limited to 4GiB because linux-mtd is, and it doesn't do RAID etc. or a lot of other things that yours does.
It would have to be fast for that kind of money. $20,000 for 1TB? A 1TB hard disk costs $200.
Granted, I'm sure you're right and it probably is that fast. There's certainly a niche for it.
(I have some relevant curiosity as I'm developing a database engine.)
Your license seems rather expensive, but I'm not one of your customers. Still, it's a motivator for other developers to undercut you.
From your basic description, it seems likely that UBI + BLKUBI (block driver over UBI) may give similar functionality to what you described but without the performance, because BLKUBI doesn't group 4k writes consecutively. (There are people using that combination in some embedded products in development now.)
However, UBIFS + loop mount, or LogFS + loop mount, might get close in performance. Both of those present a block device which can be used by any filesystem, but underneath translate to a logged tree-structured filesystem.
UBI is too slow at mounting huge drives, but LogFS is good for that.
Does your system offer a significant difference from UBIFS/LogFS (containing a single file) + loop mount?
I suspect BTRFS (similar to ZFS) will start getting good at this eventually. It's not aimed at flash right now, but it's a natural direction for a log-tree-structured filesystem to go in when SSDs become more popular. And it has better RAID than drive-level RAID in many ways.
Corrections: There are Linux log filesystems tuned for gigabytes of flash now. Look up UBIFS and logfs. There is also a variant, I think of YAFFS, used by some database engine.
I agree with most of your comment.
The point you quoted, however, is response specifically to "A 15 year old is not a "kid" anymore. They are, as far as physical characteristics are concerned, normal "woman" with breast and everything us guys like. I would not call this pedophilia."
In my opinion, sex with a 15 year old girl is not wrong if she's fine with it. You can say a 15 year old girl is not "mentally capable" of making such a decision. If you did, I would disagree except to acknowledge that more people are able to make such a decision wisely the older they get, and the age of the other person involved is also a factor.
Therefore it is wrong to automatically declare sex with a 15 year old girl rape. First, one should enquire whether she consented and was in a fit state to consent.
On the other hand, a father / step-father / uncle having sex with their 15 year old close relative is virtually always not with consent. It is hardly appropriate to ask the girl politely whether it was: there is near certainty that if she says yes, that too is the result of coercive factors. And furthermore, even in the rare cases where it is genuine consent, there is so much abuse of this kind in present society, and it is so harmful in most cases, that it must be strongly discouraged by being a crime.
Thus the point is that "a 15-year old is not a kid anymore" is valid (in my opinion) when considering the age of consent. But it is not valid in response to "Wikipedia suggests 20%-25% of women and 5-15% of men in the US experienced some form of sexual abuse as children" - the latter is about sexual abuse specifically, not about sex below the age of consent as such.
That's why I mean about this specific sub-thread conflating two issues. Some people think talk of sex with underage teenagers is the same thing as talk of sexual abuse; it is not, and the difference is very important.
And, you are right to point out sexual abuse happens to adults too. I would like to remind anyone still reading that it happens to boys and men too, and is perpetrated by women and girls too. Things people forget sometimes.
No, but it is abuse if it's her father touching her up and she doesn't want it.
This sub-thread has confused sexual abuse of teenagers with abuse of children.
Unfortunately the formal law does the same. This shows a blatant inability to make rational law in this area.
You missed the point. Pedophiles do not have sex children.
Only rapist pedophiles do that, to use the GP's terminology.
Therefore it is wrong to demonise pedophiles who are not rapists. They haven't done anything.
As the GP says, current society treats all pedophiles like criminals regardless of actual behaviour, but the majority of pedophiles have never committed any crime, nor harmed anyone, nor will they ever.
Most of them don't look at porn either. Just like everyone else.
The user interface sure isn't much to write about, but it's ability to basically play video files and play them well is better than Totem, Xine and even Mplayer in my experience - and also quite a lot better than the proprietary software/hardware set-top box combination that I work with.
:-) - namely transcoding and broadcasting/streaming video.
So I would say it's video playback is very good and that is a certain kind of maturity, but it's user interface (and as others have said, subtitle support) are not.
VLC also does unusual things - that it was the original point of VLC
Time to store your important data as encrypted dot patterns on paper? You can get quite a good information density. That would make an interesting court case.
I copy a friend's CD and download music *legally* quite often.
Copying a CD of music written and played by my friend, who told me it's cool. That's legal.
Copying GNU/Linux CDs is legal too.
Internet radio, podcasts, Magnatunes, Jamendo, anything else under Creative Commons, any of countless freely offered music downloads from the pros, promotional tracks on web sites, previews... They are all legal to download.
Music I purchase online is also downloading music... and of course legal.
What was the correct answer again?
The correct answer is learn that it's good to lie, to give the answer authority insists on hearing, rather than the plain facts.
Is this a behaviour you really want to encourage?
Governments decide between the $203 proprietary version (XP) and the $207 source-available version (XP+GNU/Linux) purchased in lots of 1M. They'll see no advantage to choosing the more expensive version.
They could buy both to pass the choice to their citizens, but as most citizens don't mind which UI they use, don't need the source, and are poor, it makes no sense for the government to spend $4M per lot just for a mere _option_ which most people won't use.
Therefore, individual kids, parents and teachers may not have the choice, even when they can afford the extra $4. XP version or no laptop at all.
This is because the OLPC is not sold as individual customised items (like Dell), but in large uniform batches through governments. And we know how much poor governments love spend extra money on giving individuals lots of choice in public services.
Choice in one place may not always lead to choice where it matters.
I hope it does though.
This is how I think the theory goes:
It's supposed to be finite from the point of view of outside observers. Material processes approaching the event horizon appear to slow down, but are also distorted and crushed and those effects will change their form.
Some of the consequences are simple physics: X-rays due to accelerating orbits, gases heating as they are compressed in the gravity well and so on.
Being ripped to unrecognizable form (perhaps strings, perhaps something unknown) at the event horizon and being radiated as Hawking radiation, which can be seen as quantum tunnelling through limitations of an event horizon, is the extreme end of that, and the time from material approach to Hawking radiation happens a finite time after approaching the hole, as measured by observers outside the hole.
The bit about information preservation says that the approaching matter's information is still present in the emitted Hawking radiation somehow. It's pretty scrambled, and that includes thorough mixing with other information that's entered the hole, so it looks random, but that doesn't rule out there being some aspect of it which is usefully non-random. In particular, certain aspects of quantum information are preserved.
The experience of time and space are quite different to observers who enter the hole, as compared with observers outside the hole who (patiently) watch their friends go in and measure the information which was their friends be radiated out. All sorts of interesting questions arise about consciousness, personal timelines, personal realities.
Nice. From the screenshots of the link, it looks very similar to Ubuntu's default Gtk theme, Human, except the icons are more systematic, less colourful and cartoonish, and slightly more space around (all typical of Gnome vs. KDE). I think I still prefer Human+Gnome - it's always been the unsubtle icons which put me off KDE visually. Much like the difference between TeX and Word: the latter is easier to do fun stuff, but scruffy. I wouldn't apply that to the Qt widget set though: QtCurve looks great and just the right level of subtlety. I wouldn't be surprised if QtCurve came first and was mimicked to make Human.
You can, and I recommend it. An app I was involved with switched from WinForms to Gtk# on Windows because Winforms just isn't that good. It was a great improvement.
I understand that Winforms 2 is catching up with Gtk and every other toolkit though: it does widget layout for you now! (wow!) (sarcasm).
Indeed, they are old ideas. But have they been used in real devices to any notable extent?
You're right, those sorts of systems wouldn't fit the definitions of dataflow programming. I wouldn't call all of them non-algorithmic - cellular automata can be highly representative of an algorithm and constructed specifically for one.
:-)
Although I agree that the name 'control flow programming' isn't very nice, I like the idea it invokes for me that the control relationships move with the data, and in a way which is not predetermined by a static control structure (i.e. a classical algorithm). I believe you can take this further, intertwining the control and data structures such that they are indistinguishable and flow, with the substrate governing the flow but not necessarily the computation.
These ideas are old in sci-fi, but I'm not aware of them being used in real devices to any notable extent. I have occasionally considered doing a PhD on exactly this topic - what a nice coincidence
That's also called dataflow programming.
Lazy functional programming is very similar to it.