Of course, once DVD-R discs hit the market and the combined price of a degradable DVD plus a blank DVD-R falls below the price of a regular DVD, the studios will drop this idea like a hotcake.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
If this came to pass, a smart person would amass all the titles of the DVDs they wanted at bargain prices, put them in cold storage, and wait until all the factories that are currently churning out 99 cent CDRs convert over to churning out 99 cent DVD-Rs. Then they'd start opening the discs, make PERFECTLY LEGAL backup copies, and keep the degraded master discs as proof of purchase.
This pay per view scheme hasn't been thought through very well.
You're right. I didn't phrase that well. There's been an awful lot of hype from the rest of the community ABOUT what Transmeta has been working on, and that's what I'm referring to.
I was just expecting more then a low-power x86 clone, and that's all these chips are to the end user.
It isn't that I don't understand their argument, I just don't accept it. It's the same old closed-source, proprietary argument.
Here's the software analogy of your argument.
"We don't give out the instruction set because we don't want to give the information needed for random people to write compilers. They would end up with things like "Linux, only for the Sparc." It makes sense for them to only let people write software for interpreted languages like BASIC, or any other future languages that we decide to allow people to write in."
What they are really doing is locking people out of the market for interpreters for other architectures. Want a morpher for the IBM 390 instruction set? Transmeta decides whether or not you get it. If it doesn't suit their business plan, you won't get it.
This is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. You can't "scratch your itch" if you're locked in handcuffs.
This is just a cheap, low power x86 clone. All the "cool stuff" is meaningless if it's not available to the interested programmer.
A closed chip, running an object-code only, proprietary compiler, translating to an undocumented machine language, all to emulate an X86 chip, oh, and "other architectures", if the high priests at Transmeta decide to grace us with interpreters for them.
Of course, once Transmeta writes an interpreter for a certain instruction set, there is no guarantee that they will support that instruction set for future chips.
How nice of them to "protect" us from having to recompile by simply forcing us to use the obsolete X86 instruction set.
I'm so underwhelmed.
We've fought too long and hard to get away from proprietary, closed-source hardware and software to go back now.
With very few exceptions, most bands make the bulk of their money on the sale of concert tickets. Very few bands ever make any money on record sales. Their cut is too small.
A dumb band will spend tons of money recording their album, then sit on their asses and expect their label to promote the hell out of them and make them rich.
A smart band will do everything they can to get people interested in attending their concerts. They will allow audience taping, put out free MP3s, tour their asses off... they basically get out there and ROCK, as you put it.
Besides, getting hit on the head by the pot of gold is pretty much a matter of chance. How many talented latin bands with good songs just faded out of the picture while the Macerana was played to death on the radio?
You DO have lifetime rights to personal playback. Once you purchase a CD, you are entirely within your rights to purchase a CDR, make a copy of that CD, and play the CDR instead of the CD. That way, if the CDR were to be damaged, you could simply make a new CDR from your master CD. Or you could make a CDR and put it in your closet, and play the original CD. Then, if the original CD were to be damaged, you would have your CDR backup.
The record industry is under no obligation to replace damaged media, or to offer a discount on multiple purchases of the same software, but that doesn't affect your rights to make backup copies of software you have legally purchased.
This is a bit of a misconception. Even if DAT were pushed by the music industry, it has inherit limitations that make it non-optimal for the consumer mass market.
I've owned 2 DAT recorders, and have recorded over 300 DATs myself.
The RIAA threw two roadblocks to try and stop the proliforation of DATs. The first was SCMS. SCMS is supposed to prevent serial copying.
SCMS is only required on "non-professional" decks. The reality is that the market for DAT recorders is so small, that most decks on the market are sold as "professional" decks, at around the same cost as "consumer" decks. In other words, if you are encountering SCMS problems, then you didn't do your homework when you purchased your equipment.
The second roadblock was a tax on DAT media. This "tax" is paid directly to the music industry, as "compensation" for the unauthorized copying that they assume you are going to use the media for.
Of course, being drafted and paid for by the recording industry, this law directs that the money be paid out to artists in proportion to their record sales. So, even though probably half the DAT tapes in existance have recordings of the Grateful Dead and Phish, the money from those blank tapes goes to Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys.
The DAT tax roadblock was also immediately bypassed. DAT tapes and DDS tapes are nearly identical. The major difference is that DDS tapes are of slightly higher quality, and because they are computer backup media, they are not subject to the RIAA tax. So, most people who use DAT simply use DDS media instead of music-branded DAT tapes, and get better media for less money. And we don't give a penny to the RIAA. Millions for our music, but not a cent for tribute!
If you want to try out DAT technology, it's easy enough to do. Sony and Tascam manufacture excellent decks. They'll set you back at least $500.00, but if you want to make professional-quality amateur recordings, it's the only way to go. The only way for you to make better recordings is to go with professional reel-to-reel, and that's MUCH more expensive.
DAT was never an appropriate technology for the mass market. Both the tapes and decks are easily damaged, and subject to wear.
The best use for DAT is live field recordings. DAT is almost universally embraced by live tapers. These are people who purchase special "taper tickets" that allow them to bring their recording equipment to concerts.
Bands allow this for several reasons. First is the realization that people are going to make tapes no matter what they do, and creating a tapers section improves the concert experience for tapers and non-tapers, because tapers want the people around them to be quiet, and many non-tapers like to yell and make noise at rock concerts. Having the tapers together avoids this conflict.
Second is that allowing taping builds a tremendous amount of goodwill among the fans toward the band, and dramatically increases the band's exposure, and ticket sales. Most bands make their real money on concert ticket sales, and a lot of people's first exposure to a new band, especially one without a record contract, is hearing a live recording. If you like the tape, you might decide to see the band next time they're in town. Bands like moe., String Cheese Incident, have leveraged their fan base by allowing audience taping.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Very grass-roots.
If you look behind the soundboard at a concert where taping is allowed, you'll see a forest of microphone stands. Look to see what's plugged into those microphones, and it's almost all DAT recorders. Next time you're at a concert, take a peak at the soundboard setup. If the concert is being recorded by the soundman, odds are overwhelming that it's being recorded on DAT.
DAT has a couple of advantages in this situation. DAT recorders are extremely small and lightweight, and can record up to 2 hours on one tape with NO break. (They can record up to 3 hours on a 90 meter DDS tape, but this is frowned upon by some because 90 meter DDS tapes are out of spec and can cause problems on some DAT recorders.)
Compare this to Minidisc, which requires a disc swap every 74 minutes, or cassette, which requires a tape flip every 45 or 50 minutes. DAT also has true (uncompressed) CD quality audio (44.1 KHz), and better-then-CD quality (48 KHz) modes.
In a live recording situation, DAT means getting the entire set without having to worry about when to change the media.
The big disadvantages of DAT are that DAT tapes and recorders are fairly fragile and subject to quick wear. A DAT recorder has a cylindrical head -- a miniature version of a VCR head. These heads rotate at extremely high speed against the abrasive tape, and wear out over time, requiring an expensive replacment. Also, the tapes themselves are very thin, and wear out after about 100 passes. Once they wear out, they start to shed, and the result is digital noise -- like a chainsaw ripping through your music.
Also, DAT tapes do not age well. The expected lifetime of an infrequently played, properly stored DAT tape is estimated to be around 10 years, due to chemical deterioration as the tape base ages.
What is becoming more common is that tapers record on DAT, then take their DATs home, and digitally upload their music onto their computers to create CDRs for listening and trading purposes. Even the people who use DAT understand its limitations.
DATs and DAT recorders would never survive in the typical consumer environment. People leave their CDs and tapes on the dashboard of their car. They leave them piled up outside their cases. They let them become dirty, and use the dirty media anyway.
DAT tapes subjected to this treatment would quickly become damaged, and a damaged DAT tape can quickly destroy the heads on a DAT deck. A DAT deck so damaged would then destroy every DAT tape that was played on it.
In other words, even people who use DATs regularly understand that DAT is not an appropriate medium to replace cassettes.
CDRs are the best user-recordable mass market media available at this time. They are cheap, can be copied at 6x or greater (With the exception of a single Tascam dual deck, DAT can only be copied at 1x), and are easy to take care of. Their biggest drawback is the 74 minute limit.
DVD-R will blow that limit out of the water. The only question is when DVD-R will come to market. That's what I'm waiting for.
Blaming the record industry for "killing" DAT simply ignores a lot of realities about the technology.
Well, I just drove from Florida to Chicago, obeying the speed limit exactly, because I really don't like being pulled over, and hey, it's the law. You're SUPPOSED to obey the law, right?
Even though I stayed in the right lane, I was passed at the rate of around 30 cars per minute, and I estimate that they were passing me at a relative speed of at least 20 miles an hour. I was driving 65, they were driving 85.
At least twice, I saw cars slam on their brakes or violently swerve into the passing lane because they were coming up on me too damn fast, and they never even considered the notion that SOMEONE out there might be obeying the speed limit.
Artificially low speed limits are a revenue enhancing device implemented at the expense of public safety.
I think you're thinking of "Hardware Wars", which was a starwars spoof where the special effects were all done with hardware store purchased stuff. I saw a 16mm print of this film sell on ebay a few months ago.
What is more likely to happen is that the agent will take the stand, and lie about what happened.
In a very recent case, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Douglas Strickland testified that it is routine practice for the highway patrol's drug interdiction teams to lie under oath in exactly these cases.
THE CONTROVERSY STEMS from a May 19, 1998, car search. At the time, Strickland and Trooper Bruce Hutheson told a Polk County judge that they had pulled up alongside a broken-down Lincoln Continental stopped on Interstate 4. They said they became suspicious of the driver, Michael Flynn, because he would not give them access to the trunk so they could check if a fuel shut-off switch had malfunctioned. When they called over the police dog they just happened to have with them, it homed in on the back of the car. Inside they ``discovered'' 220 pounds of cocaine. The state judge, on the basis of this evidence, set bail at $1 million.
Trouble was, the troopers neglected to tell the judge they knew all along that the car contained drugs. They had been with the FBI when the car was loaded. The FBI, we now know, was conducting a reverse sting and had used a remote control device planted in the car to make it inoperable.
So, in theory, he "won't do anything" because the information was obtained illegally, but in the absolutely corrupt-to-the-core "real world" of the FBI in the 1990s, he will simply lie to the judge about where the evidence came from.
Gee. Last time I checked, the U.S. Constitution was very specific about what constitutes treason: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
This is just another attempt by the FBI to terrorize an innocent citizen. They have no legal standing to accuse him of treason, and they know it.
But then, terrorizing citizens is what the FBI is there for, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, if they aren't using the information, then they should have no problem with someone reverse engineering their protocol and sending millions of bogus "hits" on random sites to their servers.
I attended a Usenix LISA conference about a year ago. The Lions book had just been released, and there was a table in the vendor area with copies for sale. I picked up a copy and started looking through it... trying to decide whether to buy it then or wait until later, when I happened to notice that the person standing next to me was having a pretty interesting conversation with the booksellers. Checked his badge... Dennis Richie! I'd no idea beforehand that he was on the program. Of course, I couldn't think of a thing to say. I settled on asking him nicely to autograph my copy (he did, nicely.)
Actually, I've worked a lot on 390 series machines, and in fact this architecture is one of the best documented computer systems ever produced. The IBM 390 Principles of Operation describes every detail about the hardware you would ever want to know. There aren't any "secrets" that I'm aware of.
Writing software that runs on the bare iron isn't a "mysterious" process... it's actually pretty easy to do. Of course, in order to actually run your program on the bare iron, you'd need to bring down your mainframe and dedicate it to your program, which is sort of hard to justify... and heck... the whole reason VM was invented was because of this problem... so why fight it?
We tried AIX/ESA back when it first came out. It was EXTREMELY inefficient, not compatable with anything else in the world, and a general loser. It deserved to die.
Back in 1993, I sat down with the Linux source and looked into doing a port to our 3090.
The biggest problems I saw right away were:
1) Lack of a tree filesystem with long names... At the time, all VM/CMS had was a flat filesystem with 8.8 character filenames. Ouch!
2) Lack of a suitable compiler. IBM's C compiler wasn't up to the job. I started to compile using the Waterloo C compiler, which was a better compiler, but I then ran into...
3) 8 character symbol name limitations... in both the IBM and Waterloo C compilers. The workaround for that was to make huge #include files that mapped all of the long function names into unreadable abbreviations.
4) Not to mention that all my development would have been done in an EBCDIC environment, and the GCC compiler, at the time, had ASCII specific logic, and defied porting. (In EBCDIC, the letters A-Z are *NOT* contiguous, and the numbers 0-9 come after the letters)
5) The output from the IBM compiler would have been in mainframe TXT format, which is basically 80 column punchcards. I didn't see an easy way to get from that to a unix style (a.out) format.
6) Device drivers... The 390 channel subsystem is based on a very high performance model, but it would have required a nearly complete rewrite of the device driver subsystems...
7) Paging differences... the 360/370/390 series has a 1M segment size instead of the more common 16M segment size. This means that a full 2G address space (the 390 series has a 31 bit address space, not a 32 bit address space), would require a 8192 byte segment table for each process. The largest piece of contiguous memory Linux could serve up at the time was 4096 bytes, so I was looking at a rework of the memory management routines... and a rework of the paging routines for the differently-sized tables...
In fact, nearly the entire hardware interface layer was different enough that it would have had to be rewritten. Things like the filesystems looked like they could drop into place without any changes...
but after a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that this was much more then a "quick hack" project, and never pursued it. Always wish I had.
Re:But *programmers* should be licensed...
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 2
If musicians had to be licensed, then *ALL* we'd get to listen to would be the Spice Girls and the like.
You think Jimi Hendrix would have been able to get a musicians license?
Licensing an activity BY DEFINITION removes all of the non-conventional and independant practitioners from that field.
This article is just more evidence of how useless Al Gore is. I could see right away that Microsoft was home to a great deal of talent and creative drive. That may be why, according to certain projections, Bill Gates may be worth a trillion dollars some day. Of course,
Or, had he picked up a newspaper, or read the findings of fact, he might well realize that the reason that Bill Gates "may be worth a trillion dollars some day", is because he built Microsoft by destroying his competition, and building a huge, repressive monopoly. I feel it's important to point out to America's young people: If Bill had not dropped out of college, he'd have a chance at being worth two trillion dollars.
Oh, Please. If Gates had stayed in college, he'd have been studying for exams instead of stealing Basic and CPM, porting them to the 8088, and landing a one-sided contract with IBM to supply software for IBM PCs.
I feel it's important to point out to America's young people when politicians demonstrate their ignorance.
Re:Taxes, copyrights, piracy, and paying the artis
on
Easy MP3 Distribution
·
· Score: 2
In the U.S., there is a tax on digital audio media. The definition of digital audio media specifically excludes computer media. The result is that CDRs and DDS tapes are significantly cheaper then recordable audio CDs and DAT tapes.
Since home console CD recorders are designed to only work with the more expensive recordable audio CDs, and because home console CD recorders have built-in copy restriction (SCMS), the recording industry has simply pushed most people who are interested in CD recording towards PC based CD recorders, which have no copy restriction systems, cheaper media, cheaper hardware, and web access.
If you want to support artists, go to their concerts. You'll put more money in their pockets from that one concert ticket then if you had bought all of their CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, once DVD-R discs hit the market and the combined price of a degradable DVD plus a blank DVD-R falls below the price of a regular DVD, the studios will drop this idea like a hotcake.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
If this came to pass, a smart person would amass all the titles of the DVDs they wanted at bargain prices, put them in cold storage, and wait until all the factories that are currently churning out 99 cent CDRs convert over to churning out 99 cent DVD-Rs. Then they'd start opening the discs, make PERFECTLY LEGAL backup copies, and keep the degraded master discs as proof of purchase.
This pay per view scheme hasn't been thought through very well.
- John
You're right. I didn't phrase that well. There's been an awful lot of hype from the rest of the community ABOUT what Transmeta has been working on, and that's what I'm referring to.
I was just expecting more then a low-power x86 clone, and that's all these chips are to the end user.
This is awful! Now what am I going to use to heat my lap?
:-)
It isn't that I don't understand their argument, I just don't accept it. It's the same old closed-source, proprietary argument.
Here's the software analogy of your argument.
"We don't give out the instruction set because we don't want to give the information needed for random people to write compilers. They would end up with things like "Linux, only for the Sparc." It makes sense for them to only let people write software for interpreted languages like BASIC, or any other future languages that we decide to allow people to write in."
What they are really doing is locking people out of the market for interpreters for other architectures. Want a morpher for the IBM 390 instruction set? Transmeta decides whether or not you get it. If it doesn't suit their business plan, you won't get it.
This is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. You can't "scratch your itch" if you're locked in handcuffs.
This is just a cheap, low power x86 clone. All the "cool stuff" is meaningless if it's not available to the interested programmer.
As I said, underwhelming.
- John
A closed chip, running an object-code only, proprietary compiler, translating to an undocumented machine language, all to emulate an X86 chip, oh, and "other architectures", if the high priests at Transmeta decide to grace us with interpreters for them.
Of course, once Transmeta writes an interpreter for a certain instruction set, there is no guarantee that they will support that instruction set for future chips.
How nice of them to "protect" us from having to recompile by simply forcing us to use the obsolete X86 instruction set.
I'm so underwhelmed.
We've fought too long and hard to get away from proprietary, closed-source hardware and software to go back now.
This might have been "cool" 10 years ago.
I Think I'll pass. Thanks for trying.
All that hype for nothing.
With very few exceptions, most bands make the bulk of their money on the sale of concert tickets. Very few bands ever make any money on record sales. Their cut is too small.
... they basically get out there and ROCK, as you put it.
A dumb band will spend tons of money recording their album, then sit on their asses and expect their label to promote the hell out of them and make them rich.
A smart band will do everything they can to get people interested in attending their concerts. They will allow audience taping, put out free MP3s, tour their asses off
Besides, getting hit on the head by the pot of gold is pretty much a matter of chance. How many talented latin bands with good songs just faded out of the picture while the Macerana was played to death on the radio?
You DO have lifetime rights to personal playback. Once you purchase a CD, you are entirely within your rights to purchase a CDR, make a copy of that CD, and play the CDR instead of the CD. That way, if the CDR were to be damaged, you could simply make a new CDR from your master CD. Or you could make a CDR and put it in your closet, and play the original CD. Then, if the original CD were to be damaged, you would have your CDR backup.
The record industry is under no obligation to replace damaged media, or to offer a discount on multiple purchases of the same software, but that doesn't affect your rights to make backup copies of software you have legally purchased.
This is a bit of a misconception. Even if DAT were pushed by the music industry, it has inherit limitations that make it non-optimal for the consumer mass market.
I've owned 2 DAT recorders, and have recorded over 300 DATs myself.
The RIAA threw two roadblocks to try and stop the proliforation of DATs. The first was SCMS. SCMS is supposed to prevent serial copying.
SCMS is only required on "non-professional" decks. The reality is that the market for DAT recorders is so small, that most decks on the market are sold as "professional" decks, at around the same cost as "consumer" decks. In other words, if you are encountering SCMS problems, then you didn't do your homework when you purchased your equipment.
The second roadblock was a tax on DAT media. This "tax" is paid directly to the music industry, as "compensation" for the unauthorized copying that they assume you are going to use the media for.
Of course, being drafted and paid for by the recording industry, this law directs that the money be paid out to artists in proportion to their record sales. So, even though probably half the DAT tapes in existance have recordings of the Grateful Dead and Phish, the money from those blank tapes goes to Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys.
The DAT tax roadblock was also immediately bypassed. DAT tapes and DDS tapes are nearly identical. The major difference is that DDS tapes are of slightly higher quality, and because they are computer backup media, they are not subject to the RIAA tax. So, most people who use DAT simply use DDS media instead of music-branded DAT tapes, and get better media for less money. And we don't give a penny to the RIAA. Millions for our music, but not a cent for tribute!
If you want to try out DAT technology, it's easy enough to do. Sony and Tascam manufacture excellent decks. They'll set you back at least $500.00, but if you want to make professional-quality amateur recordings, it's the only way to go. The only way for you to make better recordings is to go with professional reel-to-reel, and that's MUCH more expensive.
DAT was never an appropriate technology for the mass market. Both the tapes and decks are easily damaged, and subject to wear.
The best use for DAT is live field recordings. DAT is almost universally embraced by live tapers. These are people who purchase special "taper tickets" that allow them to bring their recording equipment to concerts.
Bands allow this for several reasons. First is the realization that people are going to make tapes no matter what they do, and creating a tapers section improves the concert experience for tapers and non-tapers, because tapers want the people around them to be quiet, and many non-tapers like to yell and make noise at rock concerts. Having the tapers together avoids this conflict.
Second is that allowing taping builds a tremendous amount of goodwill among the fans toward the band, and dramatically increases the band's exposure, and ticket sales. Most bands make their real money on concert ticket sales, and a lot of people's first exposure to a new band, especially one without a record contract, is hearing a live recording. If you like the tape, you might decide to see the band next time they're in town. Bands like moe., String Cheese Incident, have leveraged their fan base by allowing audience taping.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Very grass-roots.
If you look behind the soundboard at a concert where taping is allowed, you'll see a forest of microphone stands. Look to see what's plugged into those microphones, and it's almost all DAT recorders. Next time you're at a concert, take a peak at the soundboard setup. If the concert is being recorded by the soundman, odds are overwhelming that it's being recorded on DAT.
DAT has a couple of advantages in this situation. DAT recorders are extremely small and lightweight, and can record up to 2 hours on one tape with NO break. (They can record up to 3 hours on a 90 meter DDS tape, but this is frowned upon by some because 90 meter DDS tapes are out of spec and can cause problems on some DAT recorders.)
Compare this to Minidisc, which requires a disc swap every 74 minutes, or cassette, which requires a tape flip every 45 or 50 minutes. DAT also has true (uncompressed) CD quality audio (44.1 KHz), and better-then-CD quality (48 KHz) modes.
In a live recording situation, DAT means getting the entire set without having to worry about when to change the media.
The big disadvantages of DAT are that DAT tapes and recorders are fairly fragile and subject to quick wear. A DAT recorder has a cylindrical head -- a miniature version of a VCR head. These heads rotate at extremely high speed against the abrasive tape, and wear out over time, requiring an expensive replacment. Also, the tapes themselves are very thin, and wear out after about 100 passes. Once they wear out, they start to shed, and the result is digital noise -- like a chainsaw ripping through your music.
Also, DAT tapes do not age well. The expected lifetime of an infrequently played, properly stored DAT tape is estimated to be around 10 years, due to chemical deterioration as the tape base ages.
What is becoming more common is that tapers record on DAT, then take their DATs home, and digitally upload their music onto their computers to create CDRs for listening and trading purposes. Even the people who use DAT understand its limitations.
DATs and DAT recorders would never survive in the typical consumer environment. People leave their CDs and tapes on the dashboard of their car. They leave them piled up outside their cases. They let them become dirty, and use the dirty media anyway.
DAT tapes subjected to this treatment would quickly become damaged, and a damaged DAT tape can quickly destroy the heads on a DAT deck. A DAT deck so damaged would then destroy every DAT tape that was played on it.
In other words, even people who use DATs regularly understand that DAT is not an appropriate medium to replace cassettes.
CDRs are the best user-recordable mass market media available at this time. They are cheap, can be copied at 6x or greater (With the exception of a single Tascam dual deck, DAT can only be copied at 1x), and are easy to take care of. Their biggest drawback is the 74 minute limit.
DVD-R will blow that limit out of the water. The only question is when DVD-R will come to market. That's what I'm waiting for.
Blaming the record industry for "killing" DAT simply ignores a lot of realities about the technology.
Well, I just drove from Florida to Chicago, obeying the speed limit exactly, because I really don't like being pulled over, and hey, it's the law. You're SUPPOSED to obey the law, right?
Even though I stayed in the right lane, I was passed at the rate of around 30 cars per minute, and I estimate that they were passing me at a relative speed of at least 20 miles an hour. I was driving 65, they were driving 85.
At least twice, I saw cars slam on their brakes or violently swerve into the passing lane because they were coming up on me too damn fast, and they never even considered the notion that SOMEONE out there might be obeying the speed limit.
Artificially low speed limits are a revenue enhancing device implemented at the expense of public safety.
Hardly. Older vehicles won't have a governor installed on them and can go as fast as their engines will take them.
It'll just create a high priced market for older cars that can be safely controlled by the driver.
Cool! I had no idea there were 236 of them. Thanks for the link.
I think you're thinking of "Hardware Wars", which
was a starwars spoof where the special effects
were all done with hardware store purchased stuff.
I saw a 16mm print of this film sell on ebay a few
months ago.
Here's a better article
What is more likely to happen is that the agent will take the stand, and lie about what happened.
In a very recent case, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Douglas Strickland testified that it is routine practice for the highway patrol's drug interdiction teams to lie under oath in exactly these cases.
From an editorial on the case:
THE CONTROVERSY STEMS from a May 19, 1998, car search. At the time, Strickland and Trooper Bruce Hutheson told a Polk County judge that they had pulled up alongside a broken-down Lincoln Continental stopped on Interstate 4. They said they became suspicious of the driver, Michael Flynn, because he would not give them access to the trunk so they could check if a fuel shut-off switch had malfunctioned. When they called over the police dog they just happened to have with them, it homed in on the back of the car. Inside they ``discovered'' 220 pounds of cocaine. The state judge, on the basis of this evidence, set bail at $1 million.
Trouble was, the troopers neglected to tell the judge they knew all along that the car contained drugs. They had been with the FBI when the car was loaded. The FBI, we now know, was conducting a reverse sting and had used a remote control device planted in the car to make it inoperable.
So, in theory, he "won't do anything" because the information was obtained illegally, but in the absolutely corrupt-to-the-core "real world" of the FBI in the 1990s, he will simply lie to the judge about where the evidence came from.
See ... their SDI system works ...
Gee. Last time I checked, the U.S. Constitution was very specific about what constitutes treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
This is just another attempt by the FBI to terrorize an innocent citizen. They have no legal standing to accuse him of treason, and they know it.
But then, terrorizing citizens is what the FBI is there for, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, if they aren't using the information, then they should have no problem with someone reverse engineering their protocol and sending millions of bogus "hits" on random sites to their servers.
:-)
Any takers?
I attended a Usenix LISA conference about a year ago. The Lions book had just been released, and there was a table in the vendor area with copies for sale. I picked up a copy and started looking through it ... trying to decide whether to buy it then or wait until later, when I happened to notice that the person standing next to me was having a pretty interesting conversation with the booksellers. Checked his badge ... Dennis Richie! I'd no idea beforehand that he was on the program. Of course, I couldn't think of a thing to say. I settled on asking him nicely to autograph my copy (he did, nicely.)
:-)
Feel free to moderate this tripe down
Actually, I've worked a lot on 390 series machines, and in fact this architecture is one of the best documented computer systems ever produced. The IBM 390 Principles of Operation describes every detail about the hardware you would ever want to know. There aren't any "secrets" that I'm aware of.
... it's actually pretty easy to do. Of course, in order to actually run your program on the bare iron, you'd need to bring down your mainframe and dedicate it to your program, which is sort of hard to justify ... and heck ... the whole reason VM was invented was because of this problem ... so why fight it?
... At the time, all VM/CMS had was a flat filesystem with 8.8 character filenames. Ouch!
...
... in both the IBM and Waterloo C compilers. The workaround for that was to make huge #include files that mapped all of the long function names into unreadable abbreviations.
... The 390 channel subsystem is based on a very high performance model, but it would have required a nearly complete rewrite of the device driver subsystems ...
... the 360/370/390 series has a 1M segment size instead of the more common 16M segment size. This means that a full 2G address space (the 390 series has a 31 bit address space, not a 32 bit address space), would require a 8192 byte segment table for each process. The largest piece of contiguous memory Linux could serve up at the time was 4096 bytes, so I was looking at a rework of the memory management routines ... and a rework of the paging routines for the differently-sized tables ...
...
Writing software that runs on the bare iron isn't a "mysterious" process
We tried AIX/ESA back when it first came out. It was EXTREMELY inefficient, not compatable with anything else in the world, and a general loser. It deserved to die.
Back in 1993, I sat down with the Linux source and looked into doing a port to our 3090.
The biggest problems I saw right away were:
1) Lack of a tree filesystem with long names
2) Lack of a suitable compiler. IBM's C compiler wasn't up to the job. I started to compile using the Waterloo C compiler, which was a better compiler, but I then ran into
3) 8 character symbol name limitations
4) Not to mention that all my development would have been done in an EBCDIC environment, and the GCC compiler, at the time, had ASCII specific logic, and defied porting. (In EBCDIC, the letters A-Z are *NOT* contiguous, and the numbers 0-9 come after the letters)
5) The output from the IBM compiler would have been in mainframe TXT format, which is basically 80 column punchcards. I didn't see an easy way to get from that to a unix style (a.out) format.
6) Device drivers
7) Paging differences
In fact, nearly the entire hardware interface layer was different enough that it would have had to be rewritten. Things like the filesystems looked like they could drop into place without any changes
but after a couple of weeks I came to the conclusion that this was much more then a "quick hack" project, and never pursued it. Always wish I had.
If musicians had to be licensed, then *ALL* we'd get to listen to would be the Spice Girls and the like.
You think Jimi Hendrix would have been able to get a musicians license?
Licensing an activity BY DEFINITION removes all of the non-conventional and independant practitioners from that field.
This patent is describing remote job entry. Prior art for this extends all the way back to the 1960s.
Hmm ... so the last odd timestamp of our lifetime would be: 19:59:59 11/19/1999
I'll be letting out a little whoop at that time to celebrate.
:-)
This article is just more evidence of how useless Al Gore is.
I could see right away that Microsoft was home to a great deal of talent and creative drive. That may be why, according to certain projections, Bill Gates may be worth a trillion dollars some day. Of course,
Or, had he picked up a newspaper, or read the findings of fact, he might well realize that the reason that Bill Gates "may be worth a trillion dollars some day", is because he built Microsoft by destroying his competition, and building a huge, repressive monopoly.
I feel it's important to point out to America's young people: If Bill had not dropped out of college, he'd have a chance at being worth two trillion dollars.
Oh, Please. If Gates had stayed in college, he'd have been studying for exams instead of stealing Basic and CPM, porting them to the 8088, and landing a one-sided contract with IBM to supply software for IBM PCs.
I feel it's important to point out to America's young people when politicians demonstrate their ignorance.
In the U.S., there is a tax on digital audio media. The definition of digital audio media specifically excludes computer media. The result is that CDRs and DDS tapes are significantly cheaper then recordable audio CDs and DAT tapes.
Since home console CD recorders are designed to only work with the more expensive recordable audio CDs, and because home console CD recorders have built-in copy restriction (SCMS), the recording industry has simply pushed most people who are interested in CD recording towards PC based CD recorders, which have no copy restriction systems, cheaper media, cheaper hardware, and web access.
Not exactly what the RIAA had in mind.
If you want to support artists, go to their concerts. You'll put more money in their pockets from that one concert ticket then if you had bought all of their CDs.