I invaded a Windows machine with Linux over the holiday - the spare machine in a basement digital recording studio. It only has 45 gig of disk whereas the main machine has 100+:-) - anyway, there was room to put in Linux on one of the ide drives - I guess 13 gig should be enough room for now:-). The machine got Mandraked.
Unfortunately, we seem to be some distance away from being able to replace the rather awesome digital audio software running on the main machine under Win98. This is German-made software the name of which escapes me at the moment. Suffice to say that the Win98 drives are not going to get fdisked until Linux can do *everything* the Win98 machine can. (Except crash "once a week" of course.)
So, please help me, what have we got *now* that can be evaluated, and falls into the professional digital audio category? What's coming down the pipe?
Software is needed to:
do 12 + tracks of real time mixing/filtering/other processing at 96 khz, 24 bits/sample quad
support a-d input 24 bits/sample stereo interfaced through a high-end card I forget the name of (hey, I wasn't expecting the issue to come up today, I'm just the mechanic, ok?)
do all kinds of other neat, wizbang digital studio stuff
I apologize for the imprecise definition of the problem, but please, help me anyway. Goodness me, if we don't liberate this machine soon it could get sucked into the Win2000 black hole.:-o
Who's going to buy it? Of those who really have to have it right now, who's going to buy it and not throughly resent it?
People who need it and don't think the price is too high. People who want to wait can do that too: it's a free world, at least as far as that goes. This is nothing but good for all concerned.
One limiting factor in Quake's internet performance is the lag time created by poor modem implementations. Many modems are excessively stringent about enforcing buffering, with the effect that my ultimate last ditch blaster shot is delayed because the 'modem' wanted to fill its buffer.
Yes, of course. I didn't realize right away why Carmack would want to rewrite the softmodem code - essentially he'd want to write his own modem and optimize it for latency. Knowing his style, I'd say chances are he'd optimize for throughput, reliability and low cpu overhead as well. That done, it would be a trivial step to take the linmodem code and package it as a real modem, thus standing the the modem industry on its ear.
There's another part of the chain that needs to be rewritten and that's the Linux scheduler. In order to produce an excellent linmodem implementation with minimum latency you'd have to have garaunteed realtime response in the kernel. It's not so hard to do (thought doing it extremely well requires the usual talents) and it's my understanding it's being looked at by a number of people - Andrea Arkangelli's name comes to mind.
This coming from an anonymous coward with poor writing skills?
You know, troll, you need to learn to read before you can write.
Ooh, 'fag'. That's cute. 5th grade level insults really show off your intelligence. Not only am I speaking to an idiot, but a homophobe
The above comments were all given a default rating of 2, showing that just having a lot of karma doesn't necessarily mean you deserve the +1 bonus. *sigh*. It's time to raise my reading threshold to 3.
Was it Groucho Marx who said "Any club that would have me as a member, I don't want to belong to"?
Yes, moderate this down too, and none ofthis ever happened right?
This way he got something delivered to him in a few days ready to go with a warranty and customer support. He has had 0 problems with the thing for the last 3 months.
Two months ago I and a co-worker received two PC's from Gateway. They arrived slickly packages, booted up fine and performed like champs. Until I fdisked and attempted to install first Windows NT and then Linux. No luck with either - after many tries I determined the 20 gig harddisks must be broken in some way. Over the course of 3 calls to gateway support, each time being forced to wait about 40 minutes on hold to a machine, I was told by a Gateway techie that I'd have to go download a driver to boot NT, and that, for Linux, well, sorry. When I suggested that I had never had much luck with harddisks that require a driver located on the hardisk to boot, I was advised to go onto the motherboard and start yanking cables. Gateway's techie blamed the problem on the ultra-66 control, but it turned out to be nothing of the kind.
After hours of frustrated hardware juggling (the Gateway cables are cut exactly to length which sounds like a good idea and looks pretty but is actually stupid because you can't move anything to a new location without getting new cables) the computer still wouldn't take an install of anything. All we had for the effort were the usual skinned knuckles. Suspecting that the Gateway techie had a big problem in the cluefullness department, I went for a surf and learned that drives over 8 gig in size break the bad old bios way of addressing disk sectors, and that a bios extension was required. Gateway shipped those machines without the bios extension which had been commonly available for months. Not only that, but there wasn't even an update to fix the problem on their web page. Those machines only ever worked because they'd be juryrigged with a mysterious Win98-only hack to get around the fact that Gateway was shipping them with an obsolete bios.
The machines went back. We were out the cost of the shipping, the time, the skinned knuckles and the high blood pressure. I specced out a similar machine and ordered it from a local, medium-sized box builder and had no problems with it at all.
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 2
I would hazard the opinion that new windows that pop up shouldn't have the focus UNLESS the user can't accidently dismiss them with his typing, or accidently cause bad juju.
Both of these bad things happen to me all the time, and not just with Windows; CDE apps do it too. Sometimes it's not trivial to figure out what it was that popped up and vanished while I was typing, and sometimes it can be VERY BAD.
OK, this is a *very very* late reply and noone will every read it, but I feel compelled to mention that the correct and obvious thing to do is: never to give focus to such a popup unless it comes from the application that currently has focus. Applications should cooperate by never popping up a dialog unless absolutely necessary (Netscape is a HUGE offender here).
Wouldn't it be possible to make a VM that boots the new kernel, then copies itself into the older kernels memory space?
Yes I guess that would work. The main problem would be getting hold of the other kernel's memory - you wouldn't have to do any copying at all, but you have to get the memory from somewhere. Presumeably you'd be running under VMWare, or better, an open source vm os, and there would be some kind of api for sharing memory among the various client os's. You'd use that to recover the memory from the halted os. Then figure out how to hot-swap your VM os and you're done.:-)
but please, why must people discuss the moderation of their own comments??
1) There's no rule against it 2) The author is often right: the comment would get moderated down if the author didn't get the attention of the moderator first. 3) In my case, a previous comment with similar content was moderated down in the past. 4) Yes, it is a useful technique for karma whoring. That won't last long though... 5) If you want to get your controversial letter to the editor printed in a newspaper, you'd better start it with "you don't have the courage to print this" or words to that effect
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 2
not having new windows get the focus is a GREAT and intelligent default
No, that's just a starting point. You can't stop there. The next step is to distinguish whether a and unrelated program popped up the window, or the user through an explicit action. In the latter case the new window should get the focus. This is called useability. Remember that your pain theshold may not be the same as mine, and most of userland consists of people with low pain thresholds. That mean don't make do extra pointless clicks that will make them think badly of you. Don't grab away their focus by surprise, either, you're on the money there. I've mentioned this one before, I'll mention it again: when the user puts the panel away the focus should go back to a reasonable place... it's useless and irritating to the user to have the keyboard focus stay on the panel as it does now.
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 2
I think he means that E is a sorry excuse for a window manger
No, I didn't mean that - I happen to like E, even though many of the Gnome useability issues right now are E-related (I posted a pretty good list a week or two ago.) What I meant was: the Gnome team doesn't seem to have thought through the question what a window manager should do for the user, how it should act, how it should feel under the fingers. Regardless of whether the window manager is part of the desktop system or not, the desktop team is still responsible for quality control - that is, laying down the ground rules about what the WM has to do, and in some cases, how it has to do it. It's really easy to just shrug it off and say "that's not a Gnome issue, that's a WM issue". But that's bogus - you can't do that, in the end you're responsible for any problems the user might perceive in your system, no matter where they may come from. So if something's broken, it's your responsibility to make sure it gets fixed, or just fix it yourself. Is there some law against the E team accepting a patch from the Gnome team?
The Gnome team also has its own WM now (sorry, can't remember its name) so that really makes it impossible to pass the buck on issues of WM useability.
Re:Functionality Makes It To A Linux GUI
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 3
Far too often eye-candy is used to gloss over a terribly underdeveloped interface.
Yes, this applies particularly to the Gnome desktop. Sure, go ahead and mark this comment down as usual, but that doesn't make the fact go away: Gnome has got a long way to go in useability, particularly in the window manager department. Sheesh. I feel like I'm offending sensibilities every time I bring up a point in Gnome that needs fixing. This is wrong. We'll never get Gnome to where it has to be for world domination if every constructive suggestion gets buried and ignored.
I remember reading about fractal compression, which was supposed to blow JPG away. It was in the early 90s, and obviously it didn't have much effect on the industry.
Because the inventor held onto the patent too closely. Fractal compression works... encoding is horribly slow but decompression isn't too bad at all. Compression ratios are amazing, better than wavelet I think. But if the inventor ever wants to see it in widespread use, he has to let go and make it free.
The RIAA was set up to make sure musicians got royalties from jukebox companies whose big sales pitch to bars was that they could fire their live players and still have music -- and make money every time a "nickel song" was played on the juke.
Yes, and now the problem is that the RIAA is getting all the money that should be going to the musicians, plus pissing off the customers. It's time to redraw the map yet one more time. This is between us and the musicians; I'm sure we can work things out. The RIAA is a dinosaur past the end of it's life and what we are seeing is the beginning of the last act for them. They couldn't possibly act in a way more carefully calculated to hasten their demise.
The idea of DVD is a good one. Put a whole movie in high-quality digital format, with professional sound and interactive features, on a high-capacity compact disc that can also hold arbitrary data for computers. Sounds like the Compact Disc, Stage Two.
For the record, I assumed you understood that. The idea of digital media is always good. It's just that digitial media need have nothing to do with video or audio, per se. Digital media is for storing data. Period. Digital video is just another kind of data. The only things we should be worried about are: reliability; cost; availability of sufficient storage; availability of sufficient read bandwidth; availability of some method of writing.
If DVD had turned out like the original CD -- just a media, not a copyright law enforcement agency -- I think everyone would have been better off
What makes you think the original CD was well-designed? Even then the thinking was: entertainment first, computer storage second. I'm not intimately familiar with the internal details but suffice to say that writing an audio-copying program that works reliably is no mean feat - because the storage format is all screwed up. For some reason, it was thought to be good for audio players. I seriously doubt it was even good for them.
Obviously what you want in digital media is nothing more than a simple, robust track layout that does nothing more than store data. If it's as good as it can be for storing data, then it will also be as good as it can be for storing digital audio and video.
We've tried it too many times, and it has never worked well: from now on, we should never let the RIAA lawyers design digital media.
I'd like to see DVD's go the way of 8-track tapes. The whole idea was wrong from the start. We do not need DVD's in our computers. What we need is lots of digital storage, we don't need stupidly designed, error-prone, heat generating, overpriced decryption hardware hanging off it that does nothing of any use to us, and for which we are forced to pay.
If we had an open, Digital Disk alternative designed by our engineers and manufactured for us by manufacturers anxious to please 10,000,000 penguinistas, we'd buy it and use it, wouldn't we? We'd see our favorite Linux distributions available in this format wouldn't we? All it will take is unified action.
So yes, let's boycot DVD, but lets also give ourselves an alternative so we don't have to suffer for it. In the meantime I'll get by with my CDR, thankyou, and I'm not so desperate to watch Starwars on my laptop that I have to get a DVD player today.
So the decrypting method is only needed to use the contents of a DVD, while copies can be made without understanding the contents of the data.
Yes, and the logical conclusion is that the decryption method is just a tool with a perfectly legitimate purpose. Knives are also tools with a legitimate purpose and despite the fact that they can be used to cause bodily harm nobody would ever think to try to make a knives illegal, let alone making it illegal to publish information about how to make a knife.
On the "best defense is a good offense" front, please tell me why the RIAA's promotion of a closed proprietary playback method with the necessary secrets disclosed only to a select club of manufacturers and a certain large vendor of PC operating systems does not constitute restraint of trade? Isn't the RIAA looking kind of like a cartel here? Is that legal in the U.S.?
According to Tom ddram outperforms rambus anyway, due to rambus's inheritantly worse latency. Also if reliability is a concern:-) keep in mind that a slew of Rambus-related problems have dogged the new rambus motherboads/chipsets.
2,000,000 is an awfully big number of users. In no sense does it represent any kind of failure.
Frankly I'm stunned by the swift rise of FreeBSD - I thought nothing would ever touch the success of the Linux movement. Being a relatively new Linux convert I'm willing to admit that I suffered from a kind of parochialism with respect to FreeBSD - when I heard news of it I kind of wanted not to hear it because, hey, I've already found the answer and it's Linux, right?
I think I'm probably not alone in that: many of you probably have the same feelings (you know who you are:) Recently though my attitude towards the BSDs has changed from a kind of jealousy to admiration and respect. A lot of that has been due to the sympathetic and interesting coverage on Slashdot. A larger part of it is the obvious truth that there's a lot to respect technically in the BSD's - look at the security audits just for one thing. I now see the BSD's as another tool in the toolbox - it's what I'll do when I need a slimmer, tighter box that doesn't necessarily have to get all dressed up to kill.
Now, I don't seriously believe that the BSD's will ever pass Linux in popularity, for reasons that are set out nicely in your article and are beaten to death elsewhere in this thread. But neither do I believe that there is room in this world for only one open OS, especially when they are interoperable. The BSD's will help us achieve world domination. They are but one more division in the open source army.
You see, when the DVD manufacturers came up with CSS, their goal was not to protect the intellectual property contained on DVDs; rather, they were establishing an ironclad grip on the entire DVD market.
This debate is rightly focused on issues of free speech and openess of hardware specifications, but there is another BIG issue that isn't getting much air time: how the heck did we get into a situation where our mass removable storage systems are being designed by the recording industry and movie industry? What is all that encryption hardware doing in there and why does it make my computer work better? To put this another way, why are we being served up hardware that was designed in the best interests of people who aren't us, and why do we accept that?
This kind of market inversion is the same thing that has forced the spectaular rise of the open source movement. Owners of proprietray, closed source, defacto standard software systems ground us under their foot for so long that we had to react. Now what we need is a similar, open hardware movement. Sure, there are problems that are harder - designing hardware requires expensive equipment. Manufacturing it requires even more expensive equipment. But it's not like it used to be - prices are coming down. Money for open projects is abundant. So please, lets have a high-density ROM disk design that's designed according to our needs, not those of the RIA.
I want it to be a smaller format - 5 1/4 should have gone out with 5 1/4 disks, sucks for laptops and won't fit in your pocket. I want it to have current densities - in other words, even higher than what DVD offers. I want it to be completely free of any hardware that isn't directly connected with making it work better and/or cost less.
Who will design my dream ROM disk for me? Who will bankroll them? Who will manufacture it? How would we make it hit critical mass so laptop manufacturers will use it? (hint: make it cheap)
DVD was a bad idea right from the start and still is. Take out the "V", all I want is the Digigital and Disk
A man who wrote an entire enclyopedia worth of music without writing a single bad note. A man from from whom much of western music directly descends from, including the music you listen to. A man who affects more of us in our daily lives than we can possibly imagine. A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife. A man whose music is as relevant today as it was 350 years ago. A man who could see truths so deep that we still have no way of analyzing them today.
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But what are they going to do to develop linux?
The list is long. Very long. Do you know about Jikes, for starters? how about Linux on the 390? It goes on and on.
Unfortunately, we seem to be some distance away from being able to replace the rather awesome digital audio software running on the main machine under Win98. This is German-made software the name of which escapes me at the moment. Suffice to say that the Win98 drives are not going to get fdisked until Linux can do *everything* the Win98 machine can. (Except crash "once a week" of course.)
So, please help me, what have we got *now* that can be evaluated, and falls into the professional digital audio category? What's coming down the pipe?
Software is needed to:
do 12 + tracks of real time mixing/filtering/other processing at 96 khz, 24 bits/sample quad
support a-d input 24 bits/sample stereo interfaced through a high-end card I forget the name of (hey, I wasn't expecting the issue to come up today, I'm just the mechanic, ok?)
do all kinds of other neat, wizbang digital studio stuff
:-o
I apologize for the imprecise definition of the problem, but please, help me anyway. Goodness me, if we don't liberate this machine soon it could get sucked into the Win2000 black hole.
Who's going to buy it? Of those who really have to have it right now, who's going to buy it and not throughly resent it?
People who need it and don't think the price is too high. People who want to wait can do that too: it's a free world, at least as far as that goes. This is nothing but good for all concerned.
One limiting factor in Quake's internet performance is the lag time created by poor modem implementations. Many modems are excessively stringent about enforcing buffering, with the effect that my ultimate last ditch blaster shot is delayed because the 'modem' wanted to fill its buffer.
Yes, of course. I didn't realize right away why Carmack would want to rewrite the softmodem code - essentially he'd want to write his own modem and optimize it for latency. Knowing his style, I'd say chances are he'd optimize for throughput, reliability and low cpu overhead as well. That done, it would be a trivial step to take the linmodem code and package it as a real modem, thus standing the the modem industry on its ear.
There's another part of the chain that needs to be rewritten and that's the Linux scheduler. In order to produce an excellent linmodem implementation with minimum latency you'd have to have garaunteed realtime response in the kernel. It's not so hard to do (thought doing it extremely well requires the usual talents) and it's my understanding it's being looked at by a number of people - Andrea Arkangelli's name comes to mind.
This coming from an anonymous coward with poor writing skills?
You know, troll, you need to learn to read before you can write.
Ooh, 'fag'. That's cute. 5th grade level insults really show off your intelligence. Not only am I speaking to an idiot, but a homophobe
The above comments were all given a default rating of 2, showing that just having a lot of karma doesn't necessarily mean you deserve the +1 bonus. *sigh*. It's time to raise my reading threshold to 3.
Was it Groucho Marx who said "Any club that would have me as a member, I don't want to belong to"?
Yes, moderate this down too, and none ofthis ever happened right?
Remember the story about the Linux trademark in Korea? Does anybody have an update on this?
This way he got something delivered to him in a few days ready to go with a warranty and customer support. He has had 0 problems with the thing for the last 3 months.
Two months ago I and a co-worker received two PC's from Gateway. They arrived slickly packages, booted up fine and performed like champs. Until I fdisked and attempted to install first Windows NT and then Linux. No luck with either - after many tries I determined the 20 gig harddisks must be broken in some way. Over the course of 3 calls to gateway support, each time being forced to wait about 40 minutes on hold to a machine, I was told by a Gateway techie that I'd have to go download a driver to boot NT, and that, for Linux, well, sorry. When I suggested that I had never had much luck with harddisks that require a driver located on the hardisk to boot, I was advised to go onto the motherboard and start yanking cables. Gateway's techie blamed the problem on the ultra-66 control, but it turned out to be nothing of the kind.
After hours of frustrated hardware juggling (the Gateway cables are cut exactly to length which sounds like a good idea and looks pretty but is actually stupid because you can't move anything to a new location without getting new cables) the computer still wouldn't take an install of anything. All we had for the effort were the usual skinned knuckles. Suspecting that the Gateway techie had a big problem in the cluefullness department, I went for a surf and learned that drives over 8 gig in size break the bad old bios way of addressing disk sectors, and that a bios extension was required. Gateway shipped those machines without the bios extension which had been commonly available for months. Not only that, but there wasn't even an update to fix the problem on their web page. Those machines only ever worked because they'd be juryrigged with a mysterious Win98-only hack to get around the fact that Gateway was shipping them with an obsolete bios.
The machines went back. We were out the cost of the shipping, the time, the skinned knuckles and the high blood pressure. I specced out a similar machine and ordered it from a local, medium-sized box builder and had no problems with it at all.
I would hazard the opinion that new windows that pop up shouldn't have the focus UNLESS the user can't accidently dismiss them with his typing, or accidently cause bad juju.
Both of these bad things happen to me all the time, and not just with Windows; CDE apps do it too. Sometimes it's not trivial to figure out what it was that popped up and vanished while I was typing, and sometimes it can be VERY BAD.
OK, this is a *very very* late reply and noone will every read it, but I feel compelled to mention that the correct and obvious thing to do is: never to give focus to such a popup unless it comes from the application that currently has focus. Applications should cooperate by never popping up a dialog unless absolutely necessary (Netscape is a HUGE offender here).
Wouldn't it be possible to make a VM that boots the new kernel, then copies itself into the older kernels memory space?
:-)
Yes I guess that would work. The main problem would be getting hold of the other kernel's memory - you wouldn't have to do any copying at all, but you have to get the memory from somewhere. Presumeably you'd be running under VMWare, or better, an open source vm os, and there would be some kind of api for sharing memory among the various client os's. You'd use that to recover the memory from the halted os. Then figure out how to hot-swap your VM os and you're done.
but please, why must people discuss the moderation of their own comments??
1) There's no rule against it
2) The author is often right: the comment would get moderated down if the author didn't get the attention of the moderator first.
3) In my case, a previous comment with similar content was moderated down in the past.
4) Yes, it is a useful technique for karma whoring. That won't last long though...
5) If you want to get your controversial letter to the editor printed in a newspaper, you'd better start it with "you don't have the courage to print this" or words to that effect
not having new windows get the focus is a GREAT and intelligent default
No, that's just a starting point. You can't stop there. The next step is to distinguish whether a and unrelated program popped up the window, or the user through an explicit action. In the latter case the new window should get the focus. This is called useability. Remember that your pain theshold may not be the same as mine, and most of userland consists of people with low pain thresholds. That mean don't make do extra pointless clicks that will make them think badly of you. Don't grab away their focus by surprise, either, you're on the money there. I've mentioned this one before, I'll mention it again: when the user puts the panel away the focus should go back to a reasonable place... it's useless and irritating to the user to have the keyboard focus stay on the panel as it does now.
I think he means that E is a sorry excuse for a window manger
No, I didn't mean that - I happen to like E, even though many of the Gnome useability issues right now are E-related (I posted a pretty good list a week or two ago.) What I meant was: the Gnome team doesn't seem to have thought through the question what a window manager should do for the user, how it should act, how it should feel under the fingers. Regardless of whether the window manager is part of the desktop system or not, the desktop team is still responsible for quality control - that is, laying down the ground rules about what the WM has to do, and in some cases, how it has to do it. It's really easy to just shrug it off and say "that's not a Gnome issue, that's a WM issue". But that's bogus - you can't do that, in the end you're responsible for any problems the user might perceive in your system, no matter where they may come from. So if something's broken, it's your responsibility to make sure it gets fixed, or just fix it yourself. Is there some law against the E team accepting a patch from the Gnome team?
The Gnome team also has its own WM now (sorry, can't remember its name) so that really makes it impossible to pass the buck on issues of WM useability.
Far too often eye-candy is used to gloss over a terribly underdeveloped interface.
Yes, this applies particularly to the Gnome desktop. Sure, go ahead and mark this comment down as usual, but that doesn't make the fact go away: Gnome has got a long way to go in useability, particularly in the window manager department. Sheesh. I feel like I'm offending sensibilities every time I bring up a point in Gnome that needs fixing. This is wrong. We'll never get Gnome to where it has to be for world domination if every constructive suggestion gets buried and ignored.
I remember reading about fractal compression, which was supposed to blow JPG away. It was in the early 90s, and obviously it didn't have much effect on the industry.
Because the inventor held onto the patent too closely. Fractal compression works... encoding is horribly slow but decompression isn't too bad at all. Compression ratios are amazing, better than wavelet I think. But if the inventor ever wants to see it in widespread use, he has to let go and make it free.
*sigh*
Why NOT reduce the CPU to a dozen pins?
Power distribution.
Is that all? Then take the power and ground in through the top of the chip. There's a big powered fan sitting there anyway, it would be nothing new.
The RIAA was set up to make sure musicians got royalties from jukebox companies whose big sales pitch to bars was that they could fire their live players and still have music -- and make money every time a "nickel song" was played on the juke.
Yes, and now the problem is that the RIAA is getting all the money that should be going to the musicians, plus pissing off the customers. It's time to redraw the map yet one more time. This is between us and the musicians; I'm sure we can work things out. The RIAA is a dinosaur past the end of it's life and what we are seeing is the beginning of the last act for them. They couldn't possibly act in a way more carefully calculated to hasten their demise.
The idea of DVD is a good one. Put a whole movie in high-quality digital format, with professional sound and interactive features, on a high-capacity compact disc that can also hold arbitrary data for computers. Sounds like the Compact Disc, Stage Two.
For the record, I assumed you understood that. The idea of digital media is always good. It's just that digitial media need have nothing to do with video or audio, per se. Digital media is for storing data. Period. Digital video is just another kind of data. The only things we should be worried about are: reliability; cost; availability of sufficient storage; availability of sufficient read bandwidth; availability of some method of writing.
If DVD had turned out like the original CD -- just a media, not a copyright law enforcement agency -- I think everyone would have been better off
What makes you think the original CD was well-designed? Even then the thinking was: entertainment first, computer storage second. I'm not intimately familiar with the internal details but suffice to say that writing an audio-copying program that works reliably is no mean feat - because the storage format is all screwed up. For some reason, it was thought to be good for audio players. I seriously doubt it was even good for them.
Obviously what you want in digital media is nothing more than a simple, robust track layout that does nothing more than store data. If it's as good as it can be for storing data, then it will also be as good as it can be for storing digital audio and video.
We've tried it too many times, and it has never worked well: from now on, we should never let the RIAA lawyers design digital media.
I'd like to see DVD's go the way of 8-track tapes. The whole idea was wrong from the start. We do not need DVD's in our computers. What we need is lots of digital storage, we don't need stupidly designed, error-prone, heat generating, overpriced decryption hardware hanging off it that does nothing of any use to us, and for which we are forced to pay.
If we had an open, Digital Disk alternative designed by our engineers and manufactured for us by manufacturers anxious to please 10,000,000 penguinistas, we'd buy it and use it, wouldn't we? We'd see our favorite Linux distributions available in this format wouldn't we? All it will take is unified action.
So yes, let's boycot DVD, but lets also give ourselves an alternative so we don't have to suffer for it. In the meantime I'll get by with my CDR, thankyou, and I'm not so desperate to watch Starwars on my laptop that I have to get a DVD player today.
So the decrypting method is only needed to use the contents of a DVD, while copies can be made without understanding the contents of the data.
Yes, and the logical conclusion is that the decryption method is just a tool with a perfectly legitimate purpose. Knives are also tools with a legitimate purpose and despite the fact that they can be used to cause bodily harm nobody would ever think to try to make a knives illegal, let alone making it illegal to publish information about how to make a knife.
On the "best defense is a good offense" front, please tell me why the RIAA's promotion of a closed proprietary playback method with the necessary secrets disclosed only to a select club of manufacturers and a certain large vendor of PC operating systems does not constitute restraint of trade? Isn't the RIAA looking kind of like a cartel here? Is that legal in the U.S.?
According to Tom ddram outperforms rambus anyway, due to rambus's inheritantly worse latency. Also if reliability is a concern :-) keep in mind that a slew of Rambus-related problems have dogged the new rambus motherboads/chipsets.
A real player would never see these "shadows" but an AimBot would fire at these pahntom targets and that could trigger the server to shut him down.
Better, reduce his shot damage to zero. Then let him slowly suffer.
2,000,000 is an awfully big number of users. In no sense does it represent any kind of failure.
Frankly I'm stunned by the swift rise of FreeBSD - I thought nothing would ever touch the success of the Linux movement. Being a relatively new Linux convert I'm willing to admit that I suffered from a kind of parochialism with respect to FreeBSD - when I heard news of it I kind of wanted not to hear it because, hey, I've already found the answer and it's Linux, right?
I think I'm probably not alone in that: many of you probably have the same feelings (you know who you are:) Recently though my attitude towards the BSDs has changed from a kind of jealousy to admiration and respect. A lot of that has been due to the sympathetic and interesting coverage on Slashdot. A larger part of it is the obvious truth that there's a lot to respect technically in the BSD's - look at the security audits just for one thing. I now see the BSD's as another tool in the toolbox - it's what I'll do when I need a slimmer, tighter box that doesn't necessarily have to get all dressed up to kill.
Now, I don't seriously believe that the BSD's will ever pass Linux in popularity, for reasons that are set out nicely in your article and are beaten to death elsewhere in this thread. But neither do I believe that there is room in this world for only one open OS, especially when they are interoperable. The BSD's will help us achieve world domination. They are but one more division in the open source army.
You see, when the DVD manufacturers came up with CSS, their goal was not to protect the intellectual property contained on DVDs; rather, they were establishing an ironclad grip on the entire DVD market.
This debate is rightly focused on issues of free speech and openess of hardware specifications, but there is another BIG issue that isn't getting much air time: how the heck did we get into a situation where our mass removable storage systems are being designed by the recording industry and movie industry? What is all that encryption hardware doing in there and why does it make my computer work better? To put this another way, why are we being served up hardware that was designed in the best interests of people who aren't us, and why do we accept that?
This kind of market inversion is the same thing that has forced the spectaular rise of the open source movement. Owners of proprietray, closed source, defacto standard software systems ground us under their foot for so long that we had to react. Now what we need is a similar, open hardware movement. Sure, there are problems that are harder - designing hardware requires expensive equipment. Manufacturing it requires even more expensive equipment. But it's not like it used to be - prices are coming down. Money for open projects is abundant. So please, lets have a high-density ROM disk design that's designed according to our needs, not those of the RIA.
I want it to be a smaller format - 5 1/4 should have gone out with 5 1/4 disks, sucks for laptops and won't fit in your pocket. I want it to have current densities - in other words, even higher than what DVD offers. I want it to be completely free of any hardware that isn't directly connected with making it work better and/or cost less.
Who will design my dream ROM disk for me? Who will bankroll them? Who will manufacture it? How would we make it hit critical mass so laptop manufacturers will use it? (hint: make it cheap)
DVD was a bad idea right from the start and still is. Take out the "V", all I want is the Digigital and Disk
J.S. Bach.
A man who wrote an entire enclyopedia worth of music without writing a single bad note. A man from from whom much of western music directly descends from, including the music you listen to. A man who affects more of us in our daily lives than we can possibly imagine. A man who had more than 20 children from the same wife. A man whose music is as relevant today as it was 350 years ago. A man who could see truths so deep that we still have no way of analyzing them today.
Adolf Hitler is without much question, IMO, the true man of the century
No, but he might qualify as the monster of the century. Although the competition is stiff.