but keep your motives pure, no winking, no smirking, and you'll be better off at the showdown. The judge is not necessarily your enemy, but he will be if he thinks you're a smartass. Start by taking off that T-shirt.
Whether intentional or not, your entire post comes across as condescending. The belief that somehow this is a "lesson to all the kiddies" is demeaning and manages to portray the idea that all the people involved were naive and ignorant imbeciles.
The defendant, the 2600 website operator, was a 40+ year old journalist. Not a punk kid.
Experts for the defence included 50+ year old Professor Touretzky. Not a punk kid.
The defence lawyers have 20+ years experience and have acted seriously from the start.
But the point you raised which annoys me the most...
Defendents are adherents to a movement believes that if you "buy" the DVD at the store... you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it, exclusive of giving copies to other people.
You haven't even bothered following the case else you wouldn't even make this stupid claim. The defendants never once argued along this line of reasoning that "information must be free". I don't believe that rot, and clearly the defence and the defendants didn't either.
This case is far more chilling than the lame need to watch hollywood movies. What the judges decisions effectively says is that an encrypted material cannot be decrypted without the author's consent. This has far-reaching implications not for DVDs or even movies. This has the potential to destroy Linux and open source itself. Imagine your next video card has the GPU microcode kept in encrypted flash: you can't even use the card without using the vendors drivers unless you want to circumvent the encryption method. This means the DMCA allows vendors to prevent open source drivers from being traded and improved.
I think you've done a great disservice with your post. Not only did you trivialise the entire defence, implying that they were just a bunch of unruly "punk kids" who were giggling and swearing while acting disrespectfully to the court, you also manage to completely misunderstand what has happened here and why it is so important.
Napster = GOOD
My.MP3.com = GOOD
Contentville = BAD
Have you ever heard of something called 'consistency'?
First, slashdot isn't a single entity. It's possible that some of the people upset at Contentville also don't like Napster.
Second, in this particular example there is consistency. Napster makes copyrighted material available for free. Contentville makes material available for a fee.
People who approve of both Napster and Contentville are pushing for free information in all possible forms and this is entirely consistent.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad 390X and an IBM Etherjet 10/100. I also ordered a 32meg ram upgraded for the Thinkpad 390X in addition to the base install of 64meg ram.
The delivery was 1 week late. The RAM upgrade did not come with the first shipment and eventually turned up a full month after the already late delivery. The Etherjet card did not work on delivery. The card was shipped back but the replacement didn't work either. At this point I've spent nearly $40 on long distance phone calls (no call centres in my city, and I'm only in the capital city of the whole damn country). They said it was my fault and that I was too incompetent to use the software (a preinstall of 98SE and the card won't work when I push it into the cardbus slot, how this is my fault I still can't fathom). They wanted me to pay shipping and the repair costs. I ranted and raved at this point. I got free shipping to an IBM service centre in a larger city who determined that the cards were OK so the laptop was broken. But they didn't have the authority to fix the laptop. They wanted somebody (either me or IBM) to agree to pay for the repair. Keep in mind this is a brand new laptop that hasn't worked since receiving it, but I'm getting messages that I'll have to pay for any repairs. Warranty? What's that?
At this point we're into the second month after delivery. I eventually get the hardware returned (after further ranting and raving). It takes 3 weeks for another service centre (yes, a different service centre, this one has the authority to fix IBM hardware under warranty) to agree that the laptop itself is broken. They shipped it to the USA where it floated about for a few weeks. I got the laptop back, with the card working, a full 3 months and 1 week after originally receiving it.
I got one emailed apology out of the whole ugly incident. Never any offers of free upgrades, or free support, or even some retribution for long distance phone calls and the 13 weeks of wasted time and unusable hardware. And to be honest and fair there were some delays that were entirely caused by me, but overall I was an extremely unimpressed person by the end of it.
I don't wear a watch either. Haven't worn one since 1991. When you carry around a mobile phone and palmpilot at all times, there's hardly any need for another expensive gizmo to tell you the time.
Then that's your loss. I'm going to continue buying every Metallica CD/DVD, because I happen to like what they do. You can choose to boycott them because of some silly idea that your wants are more important than their rights, but that's your own foolishness.
Why bother. We've already succeeded. Lack of interest from corporate America won't stop you or I from using Linux. Developers won't turn away from Linux in disgust when someone doesn't spend millions to advertise Linux in PC-Weekly.
Keep in mind that success isn't measured in dollars and cents, or percentage of market share.
Success is when somebody installs Linux and decides they like it.
Engines run more efficiently when they're hotter. It's a thermodynamics thing. This is one of the reasons for ceramic engines, in addition to the weight savings of course.
It's slow, it's illogical, and it's obvious that it was a quick hack.
The "quick hack" of X was an evolution from earlier sync-io based windowing systems. X used async-io and achieved 2-3x better performance.
X is also extremely logical. There's a great beauty to how it has been designed. The idea of using a streamed transport is very clever.
The current implementations may have a small handful of problems, some of them speed related, but most of this is due to lack of involvement from developers. It certainly seems very popular to bash X, write lots about how "stupid" X is, claim how the author's pet-theory alternative is better (unproven in practice or code), but not actually do anything productive to improve X or provide an alternative.
Re:Aviation Fuel Cheaper than Car Gas
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
In Australia we're paying 97c per litre, which works out to $6.20 in US dollars per gallon. Americans don't realise how good they've got it with their artificially low gas prices.
The Amish don't live without technology. They choose an arbitrary cutoff point in the mid-1800s for their technology, but this is still a greatly improved technological position compared to what most of human civilisation has had to live with.
Re:Spread the message, brothers
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
Ahhh, the thought of seeing Beast Ballmer's head decapitated, and Baron Vladimir Gates consumed by a giant sandworm, fills me with a strangely satisfying sense of joy.
Junk post I solved with a "No Junk Mail" sticker on my mailbox. It works amazingly well. Haven't had a single junkmail since putting the sticker up and I used to get dozens of useless flyers every day.
Junk faxes are thankfully illegal, at least here in Australia.
Junk email I'm living with. It'd be nice if there were laws against it, but sadly the minister of communications in Australia is a complete dingbat so no luck there.
Why are all the people on slashdot so worried about Nvidia opening the drivers when they dont care about the source to the games that they run?
There's a difference between infrastructure and applications. I'm quite content to run binary only word processors, or binary only games. But I don't approve of binary only operating systems or binary only drivers.
A web browser I would count as infrastructure as well, as it is effectively a windowing system and application programming interface in its own right.
Because the bandwidth of OpenGL is significant. Really huge in fact. We're talking 100s of megabytes a second over the bus to the video card. In the near future we will be looking at 1000s of megabytes a second.
You can far more easily bog down a 2D chipset without the bus breaking a sweat.
Answer: because of X's limitations; because all X calls necessarily involve IPC; because X is inherently slow (by comparison, mind you -- I don't mean it's horribly slow).
But there is no alternative! Read what I wrote up above. All windowing systems have to provide some synchronisation method. Some of them do it with message passing. Some require mutexes. Some require async-io.
Windows does it with message passing. And you still need to assemble "packets" and you still need to call an IPC method to send the packet. It isn't any different to X when you get right down to the nitty gritty.
X's synchronisation method is amazingly cheap on UNIX systems, and has the natural benefit of also providing network transparency with little extra cost (just some byte reordering as packets are built).
I don't understand why people can't see that all windowing systems have the exact same problem here. Why do you think Microsoft was forced (by games developers) to include DirectX? It wasn't because Windows is blindingly fast.
The "X bashers" have a point. And a lot of people who do understand X quite well (Zawinski comes to mind) have said the same things.
But people like Jamie will bash specific bad points in X and with good reasons. I'm not seeing any good reasons here on slashdot: just a lot of vitriol and finger pointing and cliched remarks like "X is slow" and "X is bloated", without any actual thought about what the real problems might be. Remember that DRI is bypassing X, so it is a big leap to blame X for the problems here.
Reading A New Rendering Model For X it appears, that without bashing X the feature set could be improved.
This I entirely agree with. The font handling in X11 is an absolute joke; a relic of ideas and limitations of the 80s which certainly shouldn't be holding us back these days.
It's a great thing Keith is working on making fonts better for XFree86. He is a very smart guy and if there's anyone that can fix the font mess in X, he's the one to do it.
But keep in mind that limitations in X are in almost all cases fixed through extensions. Good examples are XInput, or DGA, or GLX, or DPS. Not a single one of these features was planned for when X was written, but now you can seamlessly support all these features in your programs.
I'm particularly impressed with DPS which now gives XFree86 users the equivalent of Macintosh's QuickDraw. Print quality rendering on the desktop and at amazingly high speed too.
Or GLX which gives us an OpenGL implementation that is simultaneously a direct renderer (when it is possible), an indirect renderer (if you don't have permissions to directly access the hardware) and a network renderer (providing X's extremely useful network transparency), all automatically sorted out at runtime.
Or DGA which gives you direct access straight to the framebuffer, but with the benefit of still being able to use XAA for hardware accelerated blits and fills and the like. This makes DGA much better than SVGALIB for 2D graphics.
Keith may eventually produce something like an XFree86-Font extension, or XFree86-AntiAlias. It is an exciting time to be using XFree86. It's all getting better, and faster, and wonderful things are being done. It's always sad to see people who harp on the few bad things in X rather than look at all the great improvements that are being made and developed.
XFree86 problems can be solved, but not if you sit on your laurels and complain.
What Linux really needs at this point is a DRI for the rest of the sub systems.
In some respects it already does. However, some of the documentation on how to use the high speed interfaces in XFree86 and Linux are a little sparse so it is possible that some people aren't aware of what's available.
For example, DGA 2.0 in XFree86 4.0 provides similar services to DirectX 2D. You can have framebuffers mapped directly into your client. No X encoding/decoding overhead for images. In effect a direct rendering infrastructure for 2D.
Then there's XVideo which provides services for registering video sources. This will assist applications working on video playback.
DRI now provides a 3D pipeline which matches (perhaps exceeds) Direct3D for the quality of the pipeline, and does it with clean OpenGL.
Some of these services are only new, or have changed since the XFree86 3.3 days, but the base is there to work with, so go use it.
People should keep in mind that Linux wasn't all that fast when it came out either. Do people remember the awful IDE performance? Or that 1.0 sucked wind through a straw for networking? Even SCSI performance was pretty bad until 2.0.
XFree86 needs people to work on it and make it better too. There are lots of areas that can be improved, or better documented, and applications need to be modified to exploit the new faster code in XFree86 4.0.
What isn't needed is a lot of complainers, or people who think that starting again is the best way to fix things (and then repeating all the same old mistakes that XFree86 has already been through and solved).
Reading articles that have floated through Slashdot recently, it is apparent that X-Windows has some limitations to it's abilities.
This makes the assumption that the X bashers know what they're talking about.
Do these impact on 3D performance? And if they do is X-Windows always going to limit 3D performance?
With DRI the 3d pipeline bypasses X. There is some resource usage by X for font/pixmap caches but it is negligible and wouldn't have caused the slowdowns seen here.
People just want a scapegoat and X happens to be the handiest thing to point a finger at. The real problem is that very few people understand X and even fewer people contribute to the XFree86 team.
There are people in XFree86 who are concerned with speed, and experiments done in the past have proven that XFree86 drives the cards as fast as they can possibly go. Performance problems are in most cases caused by lack of documentation about the cards acceleration features, not because X is getting in the way.
Remember, at it's heart XFree86 is an async-io synchronisation mechanism. Any windowing system needs a similar mechanism, be it locks or mutexes or message passing. Changing from one mechanism to another will not change performance, it simply moves the "bottleneck" somewhere else.
This is something I'm seeing much more often lately, and it's beginning to worry me. It's the implied meaning in statements like this:
how much interest would there be in the community to write updates to code for...
There's an increasing trend for people to treat the "Open Source Community" as a free labour pool. That denies the real strength of Free Software, which is that you the user have been given a great gift and a huge liberty to change your own situation, and not rely on others.
But it seems we're seeing more of "Linux Kernel deadline slips" and "When will my driver be finished". People are treating Linux like a free ride, not a liberating choice.
To be fair, perhaps this particular writer didn't have this meaning or intention, but there are definitely people out there who seem to think Free Software is all about someone else doing all the work for free. That's not what Free Software is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether intentional or not, your entire post comes across as condescending. The belief that somehow this is a "lesson to all the kiddies" is demeaning and manages to portray the idea that all the people involved were naive and ignorant imbeciles.
The defendant, the 2600 website operator, was a 40+ year old journalist. Not a punk kid.
Experts for the defence included 50+ year old Professor Touretzky. Not a punk kid.
The defence lawyers have 20+ years experience and have acted seriously from the start.
But the point you raised which annoys me the most...
You haven't even bothered following the case else you wouldn't even make this stupid claim. The defendants never once argued along this line of reasoning that "information must be free". I don't believe that rot, and clearly the defence and the defendants didn't either.
This case is far more chilling than the lame need to watch hollywood movies. What the judges decisions effectively says is that an encrypted material cannot be decrypted without the author's consent. This has far-reaching implications not for DVDs or even movies. This has the potential to destroy Linux and open source itself. Imagine your next video card has the GPU microcode kept in encrypted flash: you can't even use the card without using the vendors drivers unless you want to circumvent the encryption method. This means the DMCA allows vendors to prevent open source drivers from being traded and improved.
I think you've done a great disservice with your post. Not only did you trivialise the entire defence, implying that they were just a bunch of unruly "punk kids" who were giggling and swearing while acting disrespectfully to the court, you also manage to completely misunderstand what has happened here and why it is so important.
Metrolink contributed the module loader.
Precision Insight developed the direct rendering infrastructure currently only used for OpenGL.
First, slashdot isn't a single entity. It's possible that some of the people upset at Contentville also don't like Napster.
Second, in this particular example there is consistency. Napster makes copyrighted material available for free. Contentville makes material available for a fee.
People who approve of both Napster and Contentville are pushing for free information in all possible forms and this is entirely consistent.
Just to balance with a Thinkpad horror story.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad 390X and an IBM Etherjet 10/100. I also ordered a 32meg ram upgraded for the Thinkpad 390X in addition to the base install of 64meg ram.
The delivery was 1 week late. The RAM upgrade did not come with the first shipment and eventually turned up a full month after the already late delivery. The Etherjet card did not work on delivery. The card was shipped back but the replacement didn't work either. At this point I've spent nearly $40 on long distance phone calls (no call centres in my city, and I'm only in the capital city of the whole damn country). They said it was my fault and that I was too incompetent to use the software (a preinstall of 98SE and the card won't work when I push it into the cardbus slot, how this is my fault I still can't fathom). They wanted me to pay shipping and the repair costs. I ranted and raved at this point. I got free shipping to an IBM service centre in a larger city who determined that the cards were OK so the laptop was broken. But they didn't have the authority to fix the laptop. They wanted somebody (either me or IBM) to agree to pay for the repair. Keep in mind this is a brand new laptop that hasn't worked since receiving it, but I'm getting messages that I'll have to pay for any repairs. Warranty? What's that?
At this point we're into the second month after delivery. I eventually get the hardware returned (after further ranting and raving). It takes 3 weeks for another service centre (yes, a different service centre, this one has the authority to fix IBM hardware under warranty) to agree that the laptop itself is broken. They shipped it to the USA where it floated about for a few weeks. I got the laptop back, with the card working, a full 3 months and 1 week after originally receiving it.
I got one emailed apology out of the whole ugly incident. Never any offers of free upgrades, or free support, or even some retribution for long distance phone calls and the 13 weeks of wasted time and unusable hardware. And to be honest and fair there were some delays that were entirely caused by me, but overall I was an extremely unimpressed person by the end of it.
I don't wear a watch either. Haven't worn one since 1991. When you carry around a mobile phone and palmpilot at all times, there's hardly any need for another expensive gizmo to tell you the time.
Then that's your loss. I'm going to continue buying every Metallica CD/DVD, because I happen to like what they do. You can choose to boycott them because of some silly idea that your wants are more important than their rights, but that's your own foolishness.
Use w3m, it renders slashdot perfectly, and I think it's a better text-mode browser than lynx.
Why bother. We've already succeeded. Lack of interest from corporate America won't stop you or I from using Linux. Developers won't turn away from Linux in disgust when someone doesn't spend millions to advertise Linux in PC-Weekly.
Keep in mind that success isn't measured in dollars and cents, or percentage of market share.
Success is when somebody installs Linux and decides they like it.
Engines run more efficiently when they're hotter. It's a thermodynamics thing. This is one of the reasons for ceramic engines, in addition to the weight savings of course.
If everyone was like Woz, the world would be a better place.
The "quick hack" of X was an evolution from earlier sync-io based windowing systems. X used async-io and achieved 2-3x better performance.
X is also extremely logical. There's a great beauty to how it has been designed. The idea of using a streamed transport is very clever.
The current implementations may have a small handful of problems, some of them speed related, but most of this is due to lack of involvement from developers. It certainly seems very popular to bash X, write lots about how "stupid" X is, claim how the author's pet-theory alternative is better (unproven in practice or code), but not actually do anything productive to improve X or provide an alternative.
In Australia we're paying 97c per litre, which works out to $6.20 in US dollars per gallon. Americans don't realise how good they've got it with their artificially low gas prices.
Teacher: If I have 2 delicious cans of Pepsi, and I buy another delicious can of Pepsi, how many cans of Pepsi do I have?
Student: Pepsi?
Teacher: Half credit!
The Amish don't live without technology. They choose an arbitrary cutoff point in the mid-1800s for their technology, but this is still a greatly improved technological position compared to what most of human civilisation has had to live with.
Ahhh, the thought of seeing Beast Ballmer's head decapitated, and Baron Vladimir Gates consumed by a giant sandworm, fills me with a strangely satisfying sense of joy.
Has Linus considered changing his name to Paul?
100% is the average mean, not the average median.
Hypothetical: you have 4 people with IQs 90%, 90%, 90% and 130%. The average IQ is 100%, but 3 of these 4 people have below average IQ.
Statistics don't lie, but they can deceive.
Ah-har me hearties, raise the mizzen mast and hoist the mainsail, we're off to copy mp3s.
Junk post I solved with a "No Junk Mail" sticker on my mailbox. It works amazingly well. Haven't had a single junkmail since putting the sticker up and I used to get dozens of useless flyers every day.
Junk faxes are thankfully illegal, at least here in Australia.
Junk email I'm living with. It'd be nice if there were laws against it, but sadly the minister of communications in Australia is a complete dingbat so no luck there.
There's a difference between infrastructure and applications. I'm quite content to run binary only word processors, or binary only games. But I don't approve of binary only operating systems or binary only drivers.
A web browser I would count as infrastructure as well, as it is effectively a windowing system and application programming interface in its own right.
Nonsense!
Because the bandwidth of OpenGL is significant. Really huge in fact. We're talking 100s of megabytes a second over the bus to the video card. In the near future we will be looking at 1000s of megabytes a second.
You can far more easily bog down a 2D chipset without the bus breaking a sweat.
But there is no alternative! Read what I wrote up above. All windowing systems have to provide some synchronisation method. Some of them do it with message passing. Some require mutexes. Some require async-io.
Windows does it with message passing. And you still need to assemble "packets" and you still need to call an IPC method to send the packet. It isn't any different to X when you get right down to the nitty gritty.
X's synchronisation method is amazingly cheap on UNIX systems, and has the natural benefit of also providing network transparency with little extra cost (just some byte reordering as packets are built).
I don't understand why people can't see that all windowing systems have the exact same problem here. Why do you think Microsoft was forced (by games developers) to include DirectX? It wasn't because Windows is blindingly fast.
But people like Jamie will bash specific bad points in X and with good reasons. I'm not seeing any good reasons here on slashdot: just a lot of vitriol and finger pointing and cliched remarks like "X is slow" and "X is bloated", without any actual thought about what the real problems might be. Remember that DRI is bypassing X, so it is a big leap to blame X for the problems here.
This I entirely agree with. The font handling in X11 is an absolute joke; a relic of ideas and limitations of the 80s which certainly shouldn't be holding us back these days.
It's a great thing Keith is working on making fonts better for XFree86. He is a very smart guy and if there's anyone that can fix the font mess in X, he's the one to do it.
But keep in mind that limitations in X are in almost all cases fixed through extensions. Good examples are XInput, or DGA, or GLX, or DPS. Not a single one of these features was planned for when X was written, but now you can seamlessly support all these features in your programs.
I'm particularly impressed with DPS which now gives XFree86 users the equivalent of Macintosh's QuickDraw. Print quality rendering on the desktop and at amazingly high speed too.
Or GLX which gives us an OpenGL implementation that is simultaneously a direct renderer (when it is possible), an indirect renderer (if you don't have permissions to directly access the hardware) and a network renderer (providing X's extremely useful network transparency), all automatically sorted out at runtime.
Or DGA which gives you direct access straight to the framebuffer, but with the benefit of still being able to use XAA for hardware accelerated blits and fills and the like. This makes DGA much better than SVGALIB for 2D graphics.
Keith may eventually produce something like an XFree86-Font extension, or XFree86-AntiAlias. It is an exciting time to be using XFree86. It's all getting better, and faster, and wonderful things are being done. It's always sad to see people who harp on the few bad things in X rather than look at all the great improvements that are being made and developed.
XFree86 problems can be solved, but not if you sit on your laurels and complain.
In some respects it already does. However, some of the documentation on how to use the high speed interfaces in XFree86 and Linux are a little sparse so it is possible that some people aren't aware of what's available.
For example, DGA 2.0 in XFree86 4.0 provides similar services to DirectX 2D. You can have framebuffers mapped directly into your client. No X encoding/decoding overhead for images. In effect a direct rendering infrastructure for 2D.
Then there's XVideo which provides services for registering video sources. This will assist applications working on video playback.
DRI now provides a 3D pipeline which matches (perhaps exceeds) Direct3D for the quality of the pipeline, and does it with clean OpenGL.
Some of these services are only new, or have changed since the XFree86 3.3 days, but the base is there to work with, so go use it.
People should keep in mind that Linux wasn't all that fast when it came out either. Do people remember the awful IDE performance? Or that 1.0 sucked wind through a straw for networking? Even SCSI performance was pretty bad until 2.0.
XFree86 needs people to work on it and make it better too. There are lots of areas that can be improved, or better documented, and applications need to be modified to exploit the new faster code in XFree86 4.0.
What isn't needed is a lot of complainers, or people who think that starting again is the best way to fix things (and then repeating all the same old mistakes that XFree86 has already been through and solved).
This makes the assumption that the X bashers know what they're talking about.
With DRI the 3d pipeline bypasses X. There is some resource usage by X for font/pixmap caches but it is negligible and wouldn't have caused the slowdowns seen here.
People just want a scapegoat and X happens to be the handiest thing to point a finger at. The real problem is that very few people understand X and even fewer people contribute to the XFree86 team.
There are people in XFree86 who are concerned with speed, and experiments done in the past have proven that XFree86 drives the cards as fast as they can possibly go. Performance problems are in most cases caused by lack of documentation about the cards acceleration features, not because X is getting in the way.
Remember, at it's heart XFree86 is an async-io synchronisation mechanism. Any windowing system needs a similar mechanism, be it locks or mutexes or message passing. Changing from one mechanism to another will not change performance, it simply moves the "bottleneck" somewhere else.
This is something I'm seeing much more often lately, and it's beginning to worry me. It's the implied meaning in statements like this:
There's an increasing trend for people to treat the "Open Source Community" as a free labour pool. That denies the real strength of Free Software, which is that you the user have been given a great gift and a huge liberty to change your own situation, and not rely on others.
But it seems we're seeing more of "Linux Kernel deadline slips" and "When will my driver be finished". People are treating Linux like a free ride, not a liberating choice.
To be fair, perhaps this particular writer didn't have this meaning or intention, but there are definitely people out there who seem to think Free Software is all about someone else doing all the work for free. That's not what Free Software is all about.