Re:Bollier missed something important!
on
Reclaiming the Commons
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The true, core problem is this: We've developed a economic system that only recognizes wealth when it can be measured in currency. The big problem with this is that the worth, or the value, of many things cannot be acurately measured in currency.
You're not seeing the big picture. The actual problem is that many things cannot be accurately measured. The units used are irrelevant.
Accountants are well aware that there is a value behind non-tangibles like "good will" but this creates an accounting dilemna. They need to compare different concepts of wealth: easy stuff like assets and cash but also much harder stuff such as "good will" and "employee happiness" and "customer satisfaction". What is the unit for "satisfaction"? How do you measure "happiness"? The accountant doesn't know so he picks an arbitrary unit - the dollar - and does his best to evaluate wealth with very limited knowledge.
So my point is that the problem isn't with the units. The real problem lies with the experts who can't give accurate figures to the accountants. If activists devised and enforced a method for putting a "dollar value" on pollution then the companies would know how much the pollution is costing them. Pollution tax on power plants is a positive example of this in the real world.
Try and help the accountants by giving them better evaluations of wealth, instead of giving them bogus data and then blaming them for making mistakes.
Linux the kernel (mostly) implements the UNIX API. However Linux is not a "UNIX emulator". It is simply an implementation of UNIX.
Similarly WINE implements the Win32 API. So in that sense WINE is not an emulator. It is simply an implementation of Win32.
CYGWIN does something similar to WINE and I've only heard it referred to as a compatibility layer. However CYGWIN doesn't run unmodified UNIX binaries whereas WINE does.
iBCS does something much more like WINE. It converts SCO system calls into Linux system calls without modifying the binary. I've never heard iBCS referred to as an emulator.
You ever get the feeling that we're tinkering with a hugely complex system and observing only one or two of the most pronounced effects?
What sort of banal comment is the editor trying to make? The scientists have been saying - clearly, loudly, and continuously - that genes form a complex system where one trait might have many chromosomes and one chromosome might affect several traits. To only "get the feeling" now is incredible. Has the editor been living under a damn rock?!?
Re:You can get better than KVM for little more mon
on
USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 2
KVMs are good, and they certainly have a variety of specialized uses, but they're not versatile enough, in my opinion. For example, in situations where two computer might need to both be used at once. What do you do then?
Simply buy an IP KVM which supports multiple simultaneous sessions.
I never understood why the open source crowd decided to hop on the Unix horse.
Because UNIX:
is well documented
has 30 years of research behind it
is familiar to many programmers
has lots of free user-space software
isn't really that bad
Designing an entirely new OS means reinventing lots of wheels, relearning lots of mistakes, and massive porting efforts to get even basic apps on the desktop. Not to mention reteaching everybody how to use the new OS API, and developers needing to refind all the the tricks of the trade.
It took Microsoft 10 years to build a new OS to the point where it didn't completely suck. The research costs must have been enormous. Can you imagine the free software developers doing the same thing with no budget?
will almost certainly push a "normal" 8-bit microcontroller project up to a chip that costs $1 to $2 more. That's a lot of money when you go into production and start shipping thousands every month!!
I don't disagree with what you said, but I think you're dismissing the value of uVNC too quickly. Assuming it's not a hoax, that is! I imagine this would be extremely useful as...
... the GUI for modern touchscreen phones in large organisations. Instead of running the GUI on the handset itself, run the GUI on the PABX and export it to the handset using uVNC.
... the GUI for kiosks dotted around those larger buildings. The ones where you can lookup somebody's office number or phone extension, or get a map of the building.
... wireless tablets, like the new Microsoft one. Being able to use an 8bit CPU would give a new lower-cost option for the manufacturer. The consumer will just be happier that it costs less.
I don't see this uVNC thing appearing in your toaster! But proving it can be done gives us all more options, and isn't that a good thing?
Once again I have to say: Employees are not 'owed' employment.
Perhaps, but a company that shows no loyalty to the employee will receive no loyalty from the employee. That means the employee will do the minimum work with the minimum quality.
Treating people like interchangeable parts is legal and perhaps economically sensible but it's a good way to create disgruntled employees, and in the long term that's bad for the company.
I see a few asertions there but I don't yet see how comparing media rights and the freedom of computers to that of racial/sexual rights is wrong.
As you say, RMS is fighting for property and copyright. Women were only fighting for the vote; a "right" which +60% of USAnians don't care about anyway. I'd say RMS is fighting a far greater fight with far greater implications.
I believe racial equality is even more important but unfortunately it seems too many USAnians are still fighting that one.
We have had this in the Microsoft runtime library for umm... ten years or something...
No we haven't. MSRT bundles a fairly normal bounds checker. From reading the documentation it seems valgrind is a CPU emulator with memory read/writes logged and analysed.
I can see a troll moderation coming on.
And you deserved it.
In our world, we are moving towards garbage collection. It rocks. The simple truth is that C-style memory allocation is well understood, sub-optimal, and obsolete.
Perhaps, but until we have finished moving there will be a need for tools like this.
This is ludicrous. Someone else said it, but it bears repeating - the human ear is not just a frequency processor. Just because we haven't figured out how to measure something yet doesn't make it "mysticism."
Your belief that we can't measure it with electronic equipment is what's ludicrous. The noise is PRODUCED by electronic equipment. Why would you think your amplifier can produce a signal that an oscilloscope can't measure? It's all electrical signals and the oscilloscope is much more sensitive than the mass-manufactured circuits in the amplifier.
This is why it's mysticism. You're hearing something - produced by a $100 circuit - that a $10000 oscilloscope says isn't there. It's incredible because when this sort of mysticism is applied to computers the believers are labelled kooks. But when the same illogical beliefs are applied to audio the believers are simply "more attuned with their senses" then the skeptics.
It bears repeating simply because so many people think their ears are beyond science: if it is an electrical signal then it can be MEASURED and RECORDED and REPEATED at a precision so high that you can't detect the difference. Electronics can measure parts in billions. Your ears are not that sensitive, no matter how much mysticism you want to be true.
Now it's almost certainly true that CD isn't precise enough, nor is 128kbps MP3, but there's this huge myth that digital can NEVER be better than vinyl. Nonsense. This is the mystical part that I've argued against.
When I did this they played me two recordings of a guitar concert, one regular CD (44.1kHz, 16-bit), the other a SACD (~2.8MHz, 1-bit). None of the other settings were changed. The difference is startling.
I don't doubt you heard a difference. But I would suggest that there was a lot more involved in your A-B comparison than just the bitrate. At the very least there are differing decoders and DACs. Also the mastering between the CD and the SACD was likely done at different times by two different audio technicians. Even a tone deaf person can hear differences between a cheap CD player and a decent CD player. Hearing a difference is hardly a big deal.
So don't say that using a lossy encoding system isn't going to make a difference.
I didn't say it isn't. I said there's going to be a bitrate where you can't discern the difference. The environment places an upper bound on the fidelity of the audio system. In a noisy dance floor with 100s of people huffing and panting and stomping their feet it hardly matters if you're playing SACD or an AM radio. Calling the guy out for using MP3s is like trying to colour-coordinate your clothes for a nighttime walk.
Regarding "lossy": the vinyl recording itself is lossy. The preamp and amp introduces its own special brand of noise. The environment - the walls, the floors, the furniture - will create echoes and attenuate specific frequencies. The temperature and humidity of the air itself will affect the audio. Combine all of this introduced noise with a dancefloor full of people and what you're hearing isn't even close to the original recording.
This is why I said enough with the mysticism. If you're on a dancefloor and you reckon you can hear "crisp highs" and "warm basslines" then I'm calling you deluded. It doesn't matter how damn good the data source is: there are dozens of systems between the data source and your ears and none of them are perfect.
It's not mysticism, just an understanding that people are really good at detecting subtle differences in quality, even if it's not at a conscious level.
That is mysticism. If there were real differences in quality then you could measure them. Detecting things with your "subconscious" is how hippies speak about auras and vibes.
It was a ridiculous claim in the first place. X does not communicate via TCP sockets on a local machine -- it does so via unix sockets, which are just a fancy way of accomplishing IPC and incur virtually no overhead compared to network sockets.
It wasn't a totally ridiculous claim. The UNIX socket means two redundant copies. There's also the overhead of encoding the request, decoding the request, and sanity-checking the result.
The XFree86 developers also toyed with a shared memory transport instead of the current UNIX socket. It turns out that sockets are so quick and video cards are so slow that it didn't matter.
I also haven't mentioned the idiocy of using MP3s over a commercial grade sound system. Let's just say that the ear can detect lots of frequencies and lots of frequency ranges. When speakers have the ability to playback all those frequencies clearly the ear can easily hear the difference between analogue/44.1kHz/MP3.
Please leave the mysticism to the wiccans. A properly encoded MP3 played back on professional equipment will be beyond your ability to distinguish from the original recording. The same applies for any digital system. Perhaps 128kbps MP3s won't cut the mustard, but there will be a rate that beats even your own golden ears.
[Re: 3D] XFree86 was designed as a network transparent windowing system (whatever that fucking means), so it has the added overhead of opening network ports to... guess what? Talk to itself!
The DRI module in XFree86 is an acronym for Direct Rendering Infrastructure. 3D graphics applications render directly to the hardware, avoiding the overheads of the network pipe.
[Re: Wine] In fact, I'm not sure what it is, since most people aren't even able to run Notepad with it.
I run Office 97. It's not exactly hard.
[Re: Linux is free] The biggest lie of all, since Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Nonsense. Linux is still free, no matter how much your time is worth. The cost of the product is distinct from the cost of using it. Otherwise there would never be anything that was free.
Also the "Linux is free" phrase has a double meaning. Focussing solely on the cost aspect is either ignorant or deceptive. Either way you're gay.
They still don't get the concept of Free vs free, do they?
They probably do understand the difference but they're appealing to Linux-illiterate (though not stupid) bean-counters and pointy-hairs. They have a big voice and a lot of devoted customers, so if they say the sky is green and the world is flat and Linux costs more than Windows then many of their customers will believe them.
I'm not worried about vendors catching up. I'm more concerned about users. Until Linux gets out of the habit of breaking huge numbers of apps with releases, Microsoft will continue to own the OS market.
Do you think Microsoft does any differently? I have Win2k apps that won't run on WinNT, WinNT apps that won't run on Win2k, nothing worked on WinXP, and don't get me going about all the applications I bought for Win95 (mostly games) where WINE is my only hope of ever using them again.
If applications support Win95, WinNT, Win2k, WinME and WinXP out of the box it's only because the vendors went through trials that would have made Heracles cringe.
If anything, I'm more impressed by the Linux camp because Linus refuses to change for changes sake and the libc guys are positively anal about backwards compatibility.
CDDB works by doing a simple lookup of the CD's ID (burned in )
What total rot. There's no such thing as a "CD ID". The CDDB ID is a one-way hash of the track lengths. Here is a comment from a script I wrote a few years ago.
# The cddb disc id looks like this: sum the digits of each track's # starting point in seconds, shove that in the high byte; find the # total _playing_ time (subtract leadins) and put into the 2nd and # 3rd bytes; put the number of tracks in the low byte. The playing # time can't exceed approx 80 mins, so it will never overflow. The # summation of digits can overflow so the specs require the modulo # 255 first (not bitwise-and like you'd expect, weird huh).
It might be possible to create a CDDB ID from a full album of MP3s. But I think there's no hope if you have random MP3s from incomplete albums.
Mesa/DRI does not support hardware acceleration for nvidia cards because nvidia has not been forthcoming with documentation. I agree that seeing is believing, but your conclusion is still incorrect. If you had chosen the correct card and installed the correct software (eg, RedHat 7.3 and a Radeon card) then you would have seen hardware acceleration with Mesa/DRI.
Not that I'm knocking Mesa, but it _IS_ only a software implementation -- it won't take advantage of hardware like the geforce and radeon.
Mesa has had hardware renderers since the 3dfx. Back then it was only triangle rendering in hardware, but these days a huge amount of Mesa has hardware paths including T&L. Mesa also forms the core of the DRI and the DRI supports hardware rendering on the Radeon. The following FAQ makes this clear.
No support for SSO, thus requiring end users to use at least two logon names and passwordsone for Windows and one for Linux/UNIX.
What? Have you ever heard about OpenLDAP? Kerberos? Samba? even NIS allows you to do that!
Single Sign On isn't quite the same as a centralised authentication database. An organised Linux distribution could probably achieve SSO using PAM and ssh-agent, but I don't think any of them have tried yet.
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You're not seeing the big picture. The actual problem is that many things cannot be accurately measured. The units used are irrelevant.
Accountants are well aware that there is a value behind non-tangibles like "good will" but this creates an accounting dilemna. They need to compare different concepts of wealth: easy stuff like assets and cash but also much harder stuff such as "good will" and "employee happiness" and "customer satisfaction". What is the unit for "satisfaction"? How do you measure "happiness"? The accountant doesn't know so he picks an arbitrary unit - the dollar - and does his best to evaluate wealth with very limited knowledge.
So my point is that the problem isn't with the units. The real problem lies with the experts who can't give accurate figures to the accountants. If activists devised and enforced a method for putting a "dollar value" on pollution then the companies would know how much the pollution is costing them. Pollution tax on power plants is a positive example of this in the real world.
Try and help the accountants by giving them better evaluations of wealth, instead of giving them bogus data and then blaming them for making mistakes.
Playing devil's advocate...
Linux the kernel (mostly) implements the UNIX API. However Linux is not a "UNIX emulator". It is simply an implementation of UNIX.
Similarly WINE implements the Win32 API. So in that sense WINE is not an emulator. It is simply an implementation of Win32.
CYGWIN does something similar to WINE and I've only heard it referred to as a compatibility layer. However CYGWIN doesn't run unmodified UNIX binaries whereas WINE does.
iBCS does something much more like WINE. It converts SCO system calls into Linux system calls without modifying the binary. I've never heard iBCS referred to as an emulator.
What sort of banal comment is the editor trying to make? The scientists have been saying - clearly, loudly, and continuously - that genes form a complex system where one trait might have many chromosomes and one chromosome might affect several traits. To only "get the feeling" now is incredible. Has the editor been living under a damn rock?!?
Simply buy an IP KVM which supports multiple simultaneous sessions.
Because UNIX:
Designing an entirely new OS means reinventing lots of wheels, relearning lots of mistakes, and massive porting efforts to get even basic apps on the desktop. Not to mention reteaching everybody how to use the new OS API, and developers needing to refind all the the tricks of the trade.
It took Microsoft 10 years to build a new OS to the point where it didn't completely suck. The research costs must have been enormous. Can you imagine the free software developers doing the same thing with no budget?
I don't disagree with what you said, but I think you're dismissing the value of uVNC too quickly. Assuming it's not a hoax, that is! I imagine this would be extremely useful as...
I don't see this uVNC thing appearing in your toaster! But proving it can be done gives us all more options, and isn't that a good thing?
Perhaps, but a company that shows no loyalty to the employee will receive no loyalty from the employee. That means the employee will do the minimum work with the minimum quality.
Treating people like interchangeable parts is legal and perhaps economically sensible but it's a good way to create disgruntled employees, and in the long term that's bad for the company.
As you say, RMS is fighting for property and copyright. Women were only fighting for the vote; a "right" which +60% of USAnians don't care about anyway. I'd say RMS is fighting a far greater fight with far greater implications.
I believe racial equality is even more important but unfortunately it seems too many USAnians are still fighting that one.
No we haven't. MSRT bundles a fairly normal bounds checker. From reading the documentation it seems valgrind is a CPU emulator with memory read/writes logged and analysed.
And you deserved it.
Perhaps, but until we have finished moving there will be a need for tools like this.
Your belief that we can't measure it with electronic equipment is what's ludicrous. The noise is PRODUCED by electronic equipment. Why would you think your amplifier can produce a signal that an oscilloscope can't measure? It's all electrical signals and the oscilloscope is much more sensitive than the mass-manufactured circuits in the amplifier.
This is why it's mysticism. You're hearing something - produced by a $100 circuit - that a $10000 oscilloscope says isn't there. It's incredible because when this sort of mysticism is applied to computers the believers are labelled kooks. But when the same illogical beliefs are applied to audio the believers are simply "more attuned with their senses" then the skeptics.
It bears repeating simply because so many people think their ears are beyond science: if it is an electrical signal then it can be MEASURED and RECORDED and REPEATED at a precision so high that you can't detect the difference. Electronics can measure parts in billions. Your ears are not that sensitive, no matter how much mysticism you want to be true.
Now it's almost certainly true that CD isn't precise enough, nor is 128kbps MP3, but there's this huge myth that digital can NEVER be better than vinyl. Nonsense. This is the mystical part that I've argued against.
I don't doubt you heard a difference. But I would suggest that there was a lot more involved in your A-B comparison than just the bitrate. At the very least there are differing decoders and DACs. Also the mastering between the CD and the SACD was likely done at different times by two different audio technicians. Even a tone deaf person can hear differences between a cheap CD player and a decent CD player. Hearing a difference is hardly a big deal.
I didn't say it isn't. I said there's going to be a bitrate where you can't discern the difference. The environment places an upper bound on the fidelity of the audio system. In a noisy dance floor with 100s of people huffing and panting and stomping their feet it hardly matters if you're playing SACD or an AM radio. Calling the guy out for using MP3s is like trying to colour-coordinate your clothes for a nighttime walk.
Regarding "lossy": the vinyl recording itself is lossy. The preamp and amp introduces its own special brand of noise. The environment - the walls, the floors, the furniture - will create echoes and attenuate specific frequencies. The temperature and humidity of the air itself will affect the audio. Combine all of this introduced noise with a dancefloor full of people and what you're hearing isn't even close to the original recording.
This is why I said enough with the mysticism. If you're on a dancefloor and you reckon you can hear "crisp highs" and "warm basslines" then I'm calling you deluded. It doesn't matter how damn good the data source is: there are dozens of systems between the data source and your ears and none of them are perfect.
That is mysticism. If there were real differences in quality then you could measure them. Detecting things with your "subconscious" is how hippies speak about auras and vibes.
It wasn't a totally ridiculous claim. The UNIX socket means two redundant copies. There's also the overhead of encoding the request, decoding the request, and sanity-checking the result.
The XFree86 developers also toyed with a shared memory transport instead of the current UNIX socket. It turns out that sockets are so quick and video cards are so slow that it didn't matter.
I was nodding in agreement right up until...
Please leave the mysticism to the wiccans. A properly encoded MP3 played back on professional equipment will be beyond your ability to distinguish from the original recording. The same applies for any digital system. Perhaps 128kbps MP3s won't cut the mustard, but there will be a rate that beats even your own golden ears.
The DRI module in XFree86 is an acronym for Direct Rendering Infrastructure. 3D graphics applications render directly to the hardware, avoiding the overheads of the network pipe.
I run Office 97. It's not exactly hard.
Nonsense. Linux is still free, no matter how much your time is worth. The cost of the product is distinct from the cost of using it. Otherwise there would never be anything that was free.
Also the "Linux is free" phrase has a double meaning. Focussing solely on the cost aspect is either ignorant or deceptive. Either way you're gay.
They probably do understand the difference but they're appealing to Linux-illiterate (though not stupid) bean-counters and pointy-hairs. They have a big voice and a lot of devoted customers, so if they say the sky is green and the world is flat and Linux costs more than Windows then many of their customers will believe them.
No point feeding the troll but the "(sic)" after Heracles is misplaced. Learn your Greek mythology.
Do you think Microsoft does any differently? I have Win2k apps that won't run on WinNT, WinNT apps that won't run on Win2k, nothing worked on WinXP, and don't get me going about all the applications I bought for Win95 (mostly games) where WINE is my only hope of ever using them again.
If applications support Win95, WinNT, Win2k, WinME and WinXP out of the box it's only because the vendors went through trials that would have made Heracles cringe.
If anything, I'm more impressed by the Linux camp because Linus refuses to change for changes sake and the libc guys are positively anal about backwards compatibility.
What total rot. There's no such thing as a "CD ID". The CDDB ID is a one-way hash of the track lengths. Here is a comment from a script I wrote a few years ago.
It might be possible to create a CDDB ID from a full album of MP3s. But I think there's no hope if you have random MP3s from incomplete albums.
It's pretty obvious the parent poster knows this. He said "company focus shifts", not "company relocates".
Mesa/DRI does not support hardware acceleration for nvidia cards because nvidia has not been forthcoming with documentation. I agree that seeing is believing, but your conclusion is still incorrect. If you had chosen the correct card and installed the correct software (eg, RedHat 7.3 and a Radeon card) then you would have seen hardware acceleration with Mesa/DRI.
The jokes are good, but did you have to ruin it with a little soapbox speech about how everybody (except you) is anti-Microsoft?
What do you mean by "almost"? They are completely different products. XP is NT and ME is DOS 7 with a pretty shell.
Mesa has had hardware renderers since the 3dfx. Back then it was only triangle rendering in hardware, but these days a huge amount of Mesa has hardware paths including T&L. Mesa also forms the core of the DRI and the DRI supports hardware rendering on the Radeon. The following FAQ makes this clear.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that Mesa is software rendering only, but it's untrue.
Single Sign On isn't quite the same as a centralised authentication database. An organised Linux distribution could probably achieve SSO using PAM and ssh-agent, but I don't think any of them have tried yet.
Which is entirely my point. The expert system is useless. You talk to the expert anyway.
Sounds like MD workers share a lot in common with IT workers.