I don't think such a thing would have been possible in the sixties.
No, you are wrong. Remember, the British invented radar and a whole lot of other implausible things long before the technological tools we have grown used to an now depend upon became available. If you absolutely had to solve this problem, and you had to do it all with analog circuitry, or offline computation, going back & forth & back & forth over regular analog tape, whatever, you would, even back in the 60's. E.g., spectrum analysis has been around for some time, methinks you're carrying around a pretty good spectrum analyzer in each inner ear.
I'm not saying that this was actually done, just that it's not implausible.
Obviously, -NO- OS is secure against actual tampering with the hardware directly. After all, the tamperer could always replace the OS with his own boot disk
That's not obvious at all. For example, what do you (the invader) do if there's no floppy drive? Start pulling chips? What do you do if there's a floppy drive, and there's no password protection in the bios, you can boot from your floppy, but the file system is encrypted? Or any number of other simple obstacles that could be placed in your way.
The point is, it is possible to harden the OS (and by extension the network) against invasion, both by hardware and software means.
Yes, you can. I know because I have them, and others are sure to confirm this. Riva I didn't try, although I've heard that they're not forthcoming at this time. ATI - well, that's today's story.
As others have pointed out, there are a few things wrong with that contest; first, the fact it sounds as if you're doing someone else's work for cheap
So? There's a name for it, it's called "contributing".
Second, the fact that if you can win this contest, well, you don't need the damn book anyway.
Are you sure? I don't know about you, but no matter how good I get at something, there's always someone better, and someone who can tell me something I don't know. Or suppose I'm the one person in the world to whom this doesn't apply - I can always give the book to my kid brother, or keep it as a trophy.
The bottom line is, I want to be able to build and rebuild Mozilla, a little piece at a time, on my laptop, and I don't really care what process is used to accomplish that. The logical next step, after finding the patterns, is to implement them in a way that reduces the size of the source and the binary by some large factore. Keep going guys, this sounds terrific.
I work with industrial controls, for big machines that can kill you fast. Sometimes we joke about adding "Drag & Drop" support... well, I won't elaborate. Just imagine a very flat operator.
Let me see, I'm not the best person to write this, but I'll try to write a summary of the situation so far:
3DFX: not open, suffering because of it
Matrox: partly open, enjoyed a big boost in popularity
S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets
RIVA: mostly open, sitting pretty
Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)
ATI: opening up today, seeing the light
Anyone have corrections/more to add for this list? It sure does seem at this point that there's a connection between openness and success for hardware makers.
What do I see in my future? Clusters of Athlons and Alpha's for now, and multi-threaded hardware beyond that. Funny, unless EPIC really surprises me, Intel is nowhere in my future...
Not so fast there - put 2 + 2 together. Multi-threaded hardware, right? That means SMP on a chip, right? That means: transistors/mip matters. Well, as far as I know, the crown for best transistors/mip rating in the business goes to ARM - guess what Intel is heavily involved in?
I think there would be many, many people who would continue to listen to human-written music, even if people in double-blinded tests were unable to tell the difference.
Please let me know when the computer passes the double-blind test where it goes up against Vanessa-mae singing "Johnny". Oh, and don't forget, she wrote it too. If it passes that test, I'll happily listen to the computer, and maybe even try to get a date:)
Touche! You got me. I should have said "cyberspace as a 3D Metaphor". Much obliged for the correction.;-) But I still stand by the sense of what I said: a 3D Metaphor is inadequate for describing what goes on in... in... oh, heck, let's both agree to call it cyberspace, ok? That is - that place were're debating this right now, this is cyberspace, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. The only people who think cyberspace is really 3D are people whose only exposure to it has been via deathmatch and lawnmower man, or some such.
Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a more powerful metaphor - let's see what all you aspiring authors can come up with to blow us old cybercowboys away.
ah.... Gibson... one of my favorite authors. I really like his character development, twisty plots, scene painting, pacing, darkness, implants, lots of stuff, too much to mention. There's just one big thing that always bothered me about his stories and that's the 3D metaphor for cyberspace. I mean, get real, you just don't ride a big black rocketship through system security. Firewalls are not walls. In general, cyberspace isn't 3 dimensional - it's either infinitely dimensioned, or zero dimensioned, take your pick.
On the other hand, the concepts behind his 3D cyberspace metaphors are usually valid... more than valid, they're pretty stimulating a lot of the time. His ideas of what AI's might be like, licensed and all, are really interesting. Just... could we have a little less of the Buck Rogers space ship thing?
The reason they are in the clear is they are not DISTRIBUTING these modified versions of the GPL'ed software. They are using them internally for proprietary projects, which is perfectly fine, legal, and even desirable.
Are you sure about that? My understanding of the word "distributing" doesn't say anything about whether it's internal or external. Much like the word "copying".
My only problem with that would be that if you were going to have an Electronic Repository For All Knowledge (Encycloedia Internetica?), you'd need a REALLY good bunch of moderators
*cough* *cough* erm, I thought we were a bunch of good moderators... what's wrong with the/. model for moderating an encyclopaedia? It would have to be tuned for the new application, of course. And think of the size of db required. One thing, think how nice it would be to have such an online resource without animated gifs.
The death of Britannica would be a travesty. I grew up with one, and I suspect a lot of other/.'ers did. For it to die at Microsoft's hand would be a crime against nature.
Funny, I thought evolve or die was a very natural course for things to take. Just consider MS doing a nice job of helping things along.
Yes, hmm, well T. Rex probably did a good job of helping some other life forms pass into geological history, but in the end, being huge and having big teeth just didn't turn out to be the optimal solution.
3.Mounting Drives: I need to mount my cdrom in order to use it? This I found confusing
Obviously, Linux needs to have more smarts in terms of automounting. I believe KDE includes support for automounting, though I haven't really used it - I'm somewhat patient on this and I'm willing to wait for good automounting support in the kernel, or jump in and help build it if it doesn't arrive. In the meantime, mtools can save a lot of time if all you want to do is list a directory, or copy a file to/from a floppy disk, CDR, etc. For example:
mdir a: (list a directory on floppy. d: does the same for cdrom)
mcopy foo a: (copy file foo to floppy)
...etc. You don't need to mount the removable media to use these commands.
So why is it that smaller companies who are willing to take risks and invest in new technologies don't run circles around these older corporations who aren't and put them out of business?
Remember how the Roadrunner's Coyote always treads air for a while before he plunges 1,000 ft down the cliff embedding himself in 5 feet of solid rock?
Re:Does it really matter?
on
No Next Q3Test
·
· Score: 1
Besides the curved surfaces, what really is going to make Quake III any different than Quake II?
Besides a 3rd dimension, what made Wolfenstein better that Command Keen? Besides 2 more degrees of freedom, what made Quake better than Doom?;-)
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my PC boots straight into KDE every time I turn it on. I also use Gnome frequently, and especially I use Gnome applications (such as gnorpm and glade) under KDE. I also do it the other way around, i.e., run Gnome as my primary desktop and use KDE apps under gnome. When I want a console, I use one of the many excellent graphical terminal emulators. Only very infrequently do I go "slumming" in text-only mode - it's butt-ugly on my VIAO anyway, and it's scarcely longer to boot into graphics mode than text mode. Half the time is spent waiting for the stupid manufacturer's logo to disappear, anyway.
(BTW, are you sure you should be asking that question in your sig? Too close to flamebait, and it will generate too many off-topic responses - like this one.)
My issue with the Blackdown port is that, beautifully compliant as it is, it lacks a JIT compiler. My benchmarks make the Kaffe JITC about three times as fast as the Blackdown JDK's interpreter.
With Java designed the way it is, it should be a truly no-brainer hack to graft the Kaffe JITC onto Blackdown. If a hack it would be at all. Perhaps the relative hooks in the JITC should be exposed with CORBA, if they aren't already, that is.
Please explain to me why the FSF, or any of a number of democratic open-source initiatives should not start patenting many of the advances made in the course of developing open source software.
Because it's expensive?
Part of the.org's job would be to receive contributions through a foundation created for the purpose, to carry out this work.
because it's a slimy lawyerly thing to do?
No more slimy than a license, for example, the GPL. And a patent becomes slimy only if the process is abused. As a democratic organization answering to the open source community in general, we wouldn't abuse it, hopefully.
because playing lawyer isn't fun?
It is if you're a law student.
because it goes against the principles of openness which is the heart of what the GPL is trying to accomplish?
On the contrary, patents encourage openness. It's patents in the hands of those who would abuse them that could hurt the open source movement.
because once an algorithm appears in an OSS package, it becomes published, meaning that one year later the algorithm will become truly free, according to the principles of our movement?
In a perfect world that would be true. We do not live in a perfect world. In the world we live in, some bozo will patent the obvious extension of the idea, and next thing you know, you can't bring out version 2 without paying licence fees to said bozo, or finding yet another way to do it.
Please explain to me why the FSF, or any of a number of democratic open-source initiatives should not start patenting many of the advances made in the course of developing open source software. Any takers for starting up a new org to tackle this?
Whether Mr. Gates is responsible for the proliferation of the PC is undisputed...
I'll dispute that. PC's would have proliferated at the same rate, regardless of the presence or absence of one William Gates III. The difference would have been, we would have been roughly 8-9 years further advanced in software without him. Think about it. Right now, with Linux, we are just about finished building a system that already existed at Xerox Palo Alto research center in the late 70's. Complete with solid file system and virtual memory handling system like that perfected by IBM considerably earlier. This work should have been ported to PC's by the end of the 80's - instead, Bill took over the ball game and everything degenerated into a big control game, instead of getting on with making software as good as it can be. Turns out, Bill's team just couldn't go the distance - what with internal politics, and keeping various barbarians at bay - and dropped the ball. Meaning we unwashed hordes had to pick it up... and... scuse me, this sports metaphor is starting to get lame. In simple terms, we had to rebuild everything from scratch, do 9 years of work all over again, just so we could do it right, make it open, and have a solid base from which to attack the real issues of what computers are capable of. That was unnecessary. Thanks for nothing, Bill.
This is the second Microsoft article in a row to have a blatantly pro-Microsoft post marked up to 4 at the top of the list. Let's not read anything into this, ok? However, consider the following: If I were Bill and I perceived Slashdot to be a threat to me, what would I do? Because of moderation, I couldn't just use my normal trick of spamming it to death, so now what? Answer: create lots of moderators. Send in my guys to post humorous, or well-informed articles under "non-threatening" articles, such as the one about the house fire, or perhaps the one about the penguin-webcam. In this way, I would have a continous supply of Slashdot moderators working for Microsoft. The next step is simple: have an alarm go off whenever Microsoft is mentioned in an article header, and have someone from the spin department, or perhaps a highlevel manager, respond to it immediately. Then the Microsoft moderators are called in to mark the article up. OK, this may be pure speculation, but twice in a row is kinda fishy.
The point is, even this tactic doesn't work. There's no way Microsoft could create enough moderators to significantly damage the work of real, honest moderators, or even to control the inevitable flood of well-thought-out responses to the original FUD article. In fact, the strategy actually backfires by making Slashdot to appear less anti-Microsoft.
What needs to be done about this? If it's not a figment of my imagination that is? As far as I'm concerned, absolutely nothing. The current system can withstand this kind of attack quite well as it is.
Here are two items summarized from the strategy section of Microsoft's Halloween Memo, "released" almost exactly 1 year ago:
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Microsoft's SOAPBOX... err sorry, SOUP, oops, noo I mean SOAP is exactly one of these. Are we surprised? Our response should be to ignore it, to lampoon it, to copy it in our own, truly open protocols, whatever, but not to adopt it.
...DCOM is far more successful than CORBA is in the world...
What is this obvious FUD piece doing marked up to 4? Sure, Slashdot shouldn't be one-sided, and even pieces like this deserve to be heard one in a while, just to see the interesting rebuttals, but 4?? Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think such a thing would have been possible in the sixties.
No, you are wrong. Remember, the British invented radar and a whole lot of other implausible things long before the technological tools we have grown used to an now depend upon became available. If you absolutely had to solve this problem, and you had to do it all with analog circuitry, or offline computation, going back & forth & back & forth over regular analog tape, whatever, you would, even back in the 60's. E.g., spectrum analysis has been around for some time, methinks you're carrying around a pretty good spectrum analyzer in each inner ear.
I'm not saying that this was actually done, just that it's not implausible.
Obviously, -NO- OS is secure against actual tampering with the hardware directly. After all, the tamperer could always replace the OS with his own boot disk
That's not obvious at all. For example, what do you (the invader) do if there's no floppy drive? Start pulling chips? What do you do if there's a floppy drive, and there's no password protection in the bios, you can boot from your floppy, but the file system is encrypted? Or any number of other simple obstacles that could be placed in your way.
The point is, it is possible to harden the OS (and by extension the network) against invasion, both by hardware and software means.
3DFX: not open, suffering because of it
Matrox: partly open, coming up fast
S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets
RIVA: partly open, shipping a Linux driver, doing better than 3DFX, threatened by Matrox
Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)
ATI: opening up today, seeing the light
NeoMagic: completely closed, installed on all our laptops, a thorn in our side.
S3: Can you get 3D/multimedia specs for S3 chips?
Yes, you can. I know because I have them, and others are sure to confirm this. Riva I didn't try, although I've heard that they're not forthcoming at this time. ATI - well, that's today's story.
As others have pointed out, there are a few things wrong with that contest; first, the fact it sounds as if you're doing someone else's work for cheap
So? There's a name for it, it's called "contributing".
Second, the fact that if you can win this contest, well, you don't need the damn book anyway.
Are you sure? I don't know about you, but no matter how good I get at something, there's always someone better, and someone who can tell me something I don't know. Or suppose I'm the one person in the world to whom this doesn't apply - I can always give the book to my kid brother, or keep it as a trophy.
The bottom line is, I want to be able to build and rebuild Mozilla, a little piece at a time, on my laptop, and I don't really care what process is used to accomplish that. The logical next step, after finding the patterns, is to implement them in a way that reduces the size of the source and the binary by some large factore. Keep going guys, this sounds terrific.
DISLAIMER:
read
laugh
don't take this seriously
3DFX: not open, suffering because of it
Matrox: partly open, enjoyed a big boost in popularity
S3: completely open, enjoying a resurgence in spite of underperformance on early chip sets
RIVA: mostly open, sitting pretty
Rendition: completely closed, no longer in existence (although their design lives on)
ATI: opening up today, seeing the light
Anyone have corrections/more to add for this list? It sure does seem at this point that there's a connection between openness and success for hardware makers.
What do I see in my future? Clusters of Athlons and Alpha's for now, and multi-threaded hardware beyond that. Funny, unless EPIC really surprises me, Intel is nowhere in my future...
Not so fast there - put 2 + 2 together. Multi-threaded hardware, right? That means SMP on a chip, right? That means: transistors/mip matters. Well, as far as I know, the crown for best transistors/mip rating in the business goes to ARM - guess what Intel is heavily involved in?
I think there would be many, many people who would continue to listen to human-written music, even if people in double-blinded tests were unable to tell the difference.
:)
Please let me know when the computer passes the double-blind test where it goes up against Vanessa-mae singing "Johnny". Oh, and don't forget, she wrote it too. If it passes that test, I'll happily listen to the computer, and maybe even try to get a date
Gibson invented the term cyberspace.
;-) But I still stand by the sense of what I said: a 3D Metaphor is inadequate for describing what goes on in... in... oh, heck, let's both agree to call it cyberspace, ok? That is - that place were're debating this right now, this is cyberspace, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. The only people who think cyberspace is really 3D are people whose only exposure to it has been via deathmatch and lawnmower man, or some such.
Touche! You got me. I should have said "cyberspace as a 3D Metaphor". Much obliged for the correction.
Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a more powerful metaphor - let's see what all you aspiring authors can come up with to blow us old cybercowboys away.
ah.... Gibson... one of my favorite authors. I really like his character development, twisty plots, scene painting, pacing, darkness, implants, lots of stuff, too much to mention. There's just one big thing that always bothered me about his stories and that's the 3D metaphor for cyberspace. I mean, get real, you just don't ride a big black rocketship through system security. Firewalls are not walls. In general, cyberspace isn't 3 dimensional - it's either infinitely dimensioned, or zero dimensioned, take your pick.
On the other hand, the concepts behind his 3D cyberspace metaphors are usually valid... more than valid, they're pretty stimulating a lot of the time. His ideas of what AI's might be like, licensed and all, are really interesting. Just... could we have a little less of the Buck Rogers space ship thing?
The reason they are in the clear is they are not DISTRIBUTING these modified versions of the GPL'ed software. They are using them internally for proprietary projects, which is perfectly fine, legal, and even desirable.
Are you sure about that? My understanding of the word "distributing" doesn't say anything about whether it's internal or external. Much like the word "copying".
My only problem with that would be that if you were going to have an Electronic Repository For All Knowledge (Encycloedia Internetica?), you'd need a REALLY good bunch of moderators
/. model for moderating an encyclopaedia? It would have to be tuned for the new application, of course. And think of the size of db required. One thing, think how nice it would be to have such an online resource without animated gifs.
*cough* *cough* erm, I thought we were a bunch of good moderators... what's wrong with the
3.Mounting Drives: I need to mount my cdrom in order to use it? This I found confusing
...etc. You don't need to mount the removable media to use these commands.
Obviously, Linux needs to have more smarts in terms of automounting. I believe KDE includes support for automounting, though I haven't really used it - I'm somewhat patient on this and I'm willing to wait for good automounting support in the kernel, or jump in and help build it if it doesn't arrive. In the meantime, mtools can save a lot of time if all you want to do is list a directory, or copy a file to/from a floppy disk, CDR, etc. For example:
mdir a:
(list a directory on floppy. d: does the same for cdrom)
mcopy foo a:
(copy file foo to floppy)
So why is it that smaller companies who are willing to take risks and invest in new technologies don't run circles around these older corporations who aren't and put them out of business?
Remember how the Roadrunner's Coyote always treads air for a while before he plunges 1,000 ft down the cliff embedding himself in 5 feet of solid rock?
Besides the curved surfaces, what really is going to make Quake III any different than Quake II?
Besides a 3rd dimension, what made Wolfenstein better that Command Keen? Besides 2 more degrees of freedom, what made Quake better than Doom?
Does any one out there really use Gnome or KDE?
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my PC boots straight into KDE every time I turn it on. I also use Gnome frequently, and especially I use Gnome applications (such as gnorpm and glade) under KDE. I also do it the other way around, i.e., run Gnome as my primary desktop and use KDE apps under gnome. When I want a console, I use one of the many excellent graphical terminal emulators. Only very infrequently do I go "slumming" in text-only mode - it's butt-ugly on my VIAO anyway, and it's scarcely longer to boot into graphics mode than text mode. Half the time is spent waiting for the stupid manufacturer's logo to disappear, anyway.
(BTW, are you sure you should be asking that question in your sig? Too close to flamebait, and it will generate too many off-topic responses - like this one.)
My issue with the Blackdown port is that, beautifully compliant as it is, it lacks a JIT compiler. My benchmarks make the Kaffe JITC about three times as fast as the Blackdown JDK's interpreter.
With Java designed the way it is, it should be a truly no-brainer hack to graft the Kaffe JITC onto Blackdown. If a hack it would be at all. Perhaps the relative hooks in the JITC should be exposed with CORBA, if they aren't already, that is.
Please explain to me why the FSF, or any of a number of democratic open-source initiatives should not start patenting many of the advances made in the course of developing open source software.
.org's job would be to receive contributions through a foundation created for the purpose, to carry out this work.
Because it's expensive?
Part of the
because it's a slimy lawyerly thing to do?
No more slimy than a license, for example, the GPL. And a patent becomes slimy only if the process is abused. As a democratic organization answering to the open source community in general, we wouldn't abuse it, hopefully.
because playing lawyer isn't fun?
It is if you're a law student.
because it goes against the principles of openness which is the heart of what the GPL is trying to accomplish?
On the contrary, patents encourage openness. It's patents in the hands of those who would abuse them that could hurt the open source movement.
because once an algorithm appears in an OSS package, it becomes published, meaning that one year later the algorithm will become truly free, according to the principles of our movement?
In a perfect world that would be true. We do not live in a perfect world. In the world we live in, some bozo will patent the obvious extension of the idea, and next thing you know, you can't bring out version 2 without paying licence fees to said bozo, or finding yet another way to do it.
Please explain to me why the FSF, or any of a number of democratic open-source initiatives should not start patenting many of the advances made in the course of developing open source software. Any takers for starting up a new org to tackle this?
Whether Mr. Gates is responsible for the proliferation of the PC is undisputed...
I'll dispute that. PC's would have proliferated at the same rate, regardless of the presence or absence of one William Gates III. The difference would have been, we would have been roughly 8-9 years further advanced in software without him. Think about it. Right now, with Linux, we are just about finished building a system that already existed at Xerox Palo Alto research center in the late 70's. Complete with solid file system and virtual memory handling system like that perfected by IBM considerably earlier. This work should have been ported to PC's by the end of the 80's - instead, Bill took over the ball game and everything degenerated into a big control game, instead of getting on with making software as good as it can be. Turns out, Bill's team just couldn't go the distance - what with internal politics, and keeping various barbarians at bay - and dropped the ball. Meaning we unwashed hordes had to pick it up... and... scuse me, this sports metaphor is starting to get lame. In simple terms, we had to rebuild everything from scratch, do 9 years of work all over again, just so we could do it right, make it open, and have a solid base from which to attack the real issues of what computers are capable of. That was unnecessary. Thanks for nothing, Bill.
This is the second Microsoft article in a row to have a blatantly pro-Microsoft post marked up to 4 at the top of the list. Let's not read anything into this, ok? However, consider the following: If I were Bill and I perceived Slashdot to be a threat to me, what would I do? Because of moderation, I couldn't just use my normal trick of spamming it to death, so now what? Answer: create lots of moderators. Send in my guys to post humorous, or well-informed articles under "non-threatening" articles, such as the one about the house fire, or perhaps the one about the penguin-webcam. In this way, I would have a continous supply of Slashdot moderators working for Microsoft. The next step is simple: have an alarm go off whenever Microsoft is mentioned in an article header, and have someone from the spin department, or perhaps a highlevel manager, respond to it immediately. Then the Microsoft moderators are called in to mark the article up. OK, this may be pure speculation, but twice in a row is kinda fishy.
The point is, even this tactic doesn't work. There's no way Microsoft could create enough moderators to significantly damage the work of real, honest moderators, or even to control the inevitable flood of well-thought-out responses to the original FUD article. In fact, the strategy actually backfires by making Slashdot to appear less anti-Microsoft.
What needs to be done about this? If it's not a figment of my imagination that is? As far as I'm concerned, absolutely nothing. The current system can withstand this kind of attack quite well as it is.
Here are two items summarized from the strategy section of Microsoft's Halloween Memo, "released" almost exactly 1 year ago:
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Microsoft's SOAPBOX... err sorry, SOUP, oops, noo I mean SOAP is exactly one of these. Are we surprised? Our response should be to ignore it, to lampoon it, to copy it in our own, truly open protocols, whatever, but not to adopt it.
...DCOM is far more successful than CORBA is in the world...
What is this obvious FUD piece doing marked up to 4? Sure, Slashdot shouldn't be one-sided, and even pieces like this deserve to be heard one in a while, just to see the interesting rebuttals, but 4?? Go figure.