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  1. Far more free software is owned by banks on Stallman Responds to LinuxWorld GPL Article · · Score: 1

    Most of the free programs we use were really paid for by student loans far in excess of the amount of money it would have cost just to install Win 95 and buy something off the shelf so really most of our software is owned by banks. We would have far less people to write free software if Stafford and Educaid didn't exist. Those people would be flipping hamburgers or cleaning toilets instead of coding. The banks have increadible power over what software we actually get.

  2. DVD 2 on Post-Hacked DVD: Where to Go? · · Score: 2

    The EEs in the big companies are going to create DVD-2, utilizing a 1024 bit encryption standard incompatible with existing DVD players and impossible to crack. The problem is that our college crackers are breaking things that engineers create but they aren't creating anything themselves. The only way to solve the intellectual property wars is to create a new format to begin with instead of breaking into what other engineers create.

  3. Pool of milk on Linkage between Cell-phone Usage and Long Term Memory Loss · · Score: 2

    I wouldn't be able to swim to a platform in a pool of milk either.

  4. Won't last long. on Why DVD Encryption Crack was a Cinch · · Score: 2

    Next year DVD-2 will come out with a 1024 bit encription incompatible with existing DVD players. So few consumers can afford DVD right now they'll lose nothing by burying the cracked format and starting over. It's not good enough for college geniouses to crack stuff other people have developed. In order to solve these intellectual property wars, college geniouses have to start developing the stuff themselves.

  5. It was 3-5 years away 6 years ago. on Single Molecule Memory · · Score: 2

    I saw many Science articles on molecular memory and computers in 1993. Seems whenever grant money for this thing dries up, people start calling portals and TV stations saying they're on the verge of a magor breakthrough. Why are they only on the verge of major breakthroughs when their grants run out?

  6. Technology runs on punctuated evolution on How the Internet Boom Harms Society · · Score: 2

    The biggest drawback to the internet boom is that we have no innovation. Companies aren't taking chances anymore. They're perfectly content to keep doing things the way they've been doing them for the last 5 years.

    Just like all living processes, technology runs on punctuated evolution. Only during times of stress and recession do we engineer new technology. The intervening periods like the present are when tinkerers come in and improve the technology, but we won't see any revolutions until the next recession.

    The Alpha, Pentium, and PowerPC architectures we use today were all products of the 1993 recession when EEs were working their asses off to come up with something big. All improvements since then have been incremental tweeks on the same architecture.

    Remember the 1980 recession? That was coincidentally the second most recent semiconductor boom. Almost all the technology we used in the 80's was developed during that recession. The Yamaha DX-7 was such a monument of hard working EEs that it remained king for 10 years, surpassing all expectations for an electronic product. The Commodore 64 and all those 8 bit computers came from the 1980 recession.

    Until businesses start feeling pressure to experiment again, it's going to be a bad time for engineers and a good one for tinkerers.

  7. Probably illegal what these kids are doing on Watching DVDs in Linux HOWTO · · Score: 1

    Well as far as we know the AC3 and MPEG-2 codecs contain zillions of patents. Eventually someone from Fraunhoffer or Thompson is going to get up in the morning wanting more money and he's going to take down all our DVD projects. I don't believe DVD decoding is a CS major's cup of tea just like operating system selection isn't an EE's cup of tea. That why we don't see any of it. The problem is getting the EEs who are interested in multimedia to get interested in the operating system they use and getting the CS majors who are interested in the operating system to get interested in multimedia. There's a constant rift there.

  8. Quite different from 2 years ago on Zona Research Does Programming Language Poll · · Score: 2

    In 1997 when another language poll was posted on /. the results were highly in favor of Java. In 1997 Java was going to save the world. Corel had ported WordPerfect to Java. Web browsers were being written in Java. Well now it looks like they're emphasizing Visual Basic. Basic seems to have taken over the world in 1999. As for C++, since when did efficiency in the workplace outweigh credentials and business suits?

  9. Hemos, don't get the kids fired up on biotech on Biotech Makes the News · · Score: 3

    Now if Biotech was really that employable you would have gone into biotech instead of working at Andover and we all know you're a biotech freak. Don't get these kids fired up about something which is almost entirely post-docs who can't find jobs. After the first 6 years of grad school you realize how increadibly tightly pigeonholed it is. Then after selecting one small, discreet area of biotech and pigeonholing yourself you realize that despite all the hype, the one discrete area of the one gene that got your postdoc buddy that day job in North Dakota was one base pair away from yours so you didn't get it. None of the grad students I've encountered are happy and they all wish they were in CS. Now MD degrees, if you're famous enough to get one, have an easier time. The resources available to MDs makes postdoc work look like tinker toys.

  10. If only it happened in 1992 on Microsoft Cracked · · Score: 2

    Remember back in the early 90's when stalkers were the rage in hollywood? If only there was an internet in 1992 this guy would've gotten busted not for cracking but for posting a love letter.

  11. Bottom Line: Money on Uncle Robin's Advice for Lovelorn Geeks · · Score: 2

    All these points can be summarized as follows: you're the breadwinner. Women you fall in love with shouldn't be involved in the perils of the economy. They shouldn't be geeks. They shouldn't be interested in computers. Their jobs shouldn't be technically oriented. Every one of these points tell us something not to expect out of women that is pretty fundamental to the modern economy. The problem is that someone has to go out and battle the economy so if you want these humanity majors you'd better get used to being the provider.

  12. Byte wrapping blues on Intel Releasing 700Mhz P3s · · Score: 1

    Ever notice how your sound programs tend to crash when your tracks go over 1 hour? That's because certain positioning operations are wrapping around all 32 bits. New processors produce gigabytes of video in seconds. In two minutes you can exceed the 2 gig limit and produce enough audio to wrap around a 32 bit word several times over.

    32 bit wrapping is going to get more and more painful until higher clockspeeds lose all meaning. 700Mhz is way beyond the limit for a 32 bit processor for which 2 gig file limits and chronic 32 bit wraparounds started defeating the processor's usefulness at 500Mhz. We're getting to where more clock cycles are being used to check for bytewraps than process data.

  13. Sounds more accurate than 10 million on Linux Counter Hits 120,000 · · Score: 1

    Ever notice how you never see the same users year after year but users seem to move in and out of Linux as they're challenged by different problems. At any given time I'd say 120,000 is an accurate count not of installations and back room routers but of the people actually using it.

  14. That's a problem that OSS didn't solve either on Alan Cox on The Risks of Closed Source Computing · · Score: 2

    That single OS provider is the only one offering a solution in many areas. Try doing video on Linux. It's trivial for a large company like Microsoft to make it work. Take away large corporate funding and no-one has the money to get that basic feature to actually work. The only reply you ever get from someone who actually knows how to fix it is "See what you can code yourself. I'm out of time for this project."

  15. How to attract geeks? on How Not to Attract Geeks · · Score: 2

    Write a web page on how not to attract geeks and don't put the your name on it. Thank God I'm not a woman. So many games they have to play as the followers and recievers, always patterning their lives based on men's every whim. You don't see men getting told to avoid phrases in the english language. Maybe the best strategy is for women to become the initiators and providers.

  16. Everyone wants to program C++/Linux on It's the Developers, Stupid!: The Real NT-Linux Battle · · Score: 2

    We're not dealing with a lack of development tools on Linux but an overwhelmingly large number of people who want to do develop on Linux such that every job posting for a Linux developer gets millions of resumes. If you want to develop on Linux you're better off doing it at home than whining about a lack jobs for it. The reason anything is employable is that no-one wants to do it.

  17. No. on Linux Kernel 2.2.13 Makes the Scene · · Score: 2

    KeepaliveThread::run: device crashed
    KeepaliveThread::run: device crashed
    KeepaliveThread::run: device crashed
    KeepaliveThread::run: device crashed

    After only 7 minutes of capturing 640x480 15fps. The biggest joke of all about this driver is that the bug was fixed by an EE student in his video4linux 2 revision and promptly rejected by Linus. At the same time the student created several new bugs which don't exist in the video4linux 1 revision. So we have 2 drivers: 1 which deadlocks at high frame rates and 1 which gives offset fields but doesn't deadlock and with the holidays coming don't expect anything to get fixed.

  18. No solution to bttv lockups on Linux Kernel 2.2.13 Makes the Scene · · Score: 2

    Well it's been 2 years and noone's stepped up to make the bttv driver actually work. It deadlocks at framerates between 10 and 24 quite nicely. There was an attempt to rewrite the driver for Video4linux 2 but that guy is in upper division coursework and has more to do besides hacking Linux.

  19. Booleen algebra? on Contemporary Logic Design · · Score: 2

    It's interesting there's no mention of booleen algebra. Is everyone taking booleen algebra as a seperate course from logic design?

  20. "Woefully short of other operating systems" on DVD for Linux: an Interview With the Developers · · Score: 2

    The only reason it seems woefully short is that users don't accept the existance of commercial software on it. BeOS, which seems to have eclipsed Linux in 1/4th the time has a user base which is more accepting of commercial software so they're not woefully short. If you're willing to count commercial software, Linux becomes very competitive.

  21. Is 1Ghz fast enough? on AMD Planning 1GHz CPUs · · Score: 2

    I've got this dual Celeron 550 compressing MJPA video with both processors maxing out the local buss. With 1100 MIPS they'll do only 15 frames/sec of 640x480. The problem isn't the MIPS but this 100Mhz buss. We need at least a 300Mhz bus before CPUs become useful. Anyone else benchmarking video capture on their Athlons?

  22. Been around for years but no-one's used it on Linux to Get Windows Apps? · · Score: 2

    These things have been around forever yet we don't see any Windows apps anyway. For around $1000 you could have gotten a Win32 environment years ago but no-one did. There's a bigger demand for a Linux environment on Win32 as we have many unfinished tools for this. Cygwin never supported threads. Mingwin was abandonned two years ago.

  23. Re:malda you dickhead on Apple Re-Reverses G4 Order Cancellations · · Score: 2

    I agree 5 down moderations in 24 hours is kind of steep and the moderation is pretty biased when you say something negative about GPL. What if 5 stories on Linux video editing get posted on 24 hours? Not many positive words to say on that. Video editing software takes a lot of code and Linux enthusiasts don't like large programs so you don't see it.

  24. Sounds like Steve Jobless living up to his image on Apple Re-Reverses G4 Order Cancellations · · Score: 4

    Every impression of Steve Jobless I've seen is that he's a madman. He probably got to work on the morning of the chip warnings, yelled and screamed "YOU GUYS ARE NOT BEING PAID TO BE A BUNCH OF CLOWNS!!!!! I NEED ARTISTS!!!!!!" at his employees for the chips being defective and to ordered ramped up production of defective 500Mhz computers to stop a PR disaster.

    Steve yelled as loud as he could at Motorala engineers "ARE YOU VIRGINS!!?!" to push the defective chips out while Motorola engineers probably winced that morning and wondered what the idiot was doing. Then Apple started getting complaints from customers.

    At 3am fielding a sea of customer complaints Steve's engineers probably started yelling at him "I'M SO SICK AND TIRED OF YOUR ABUSE ON THIS PROJECT!!!!" for being such a madman. Steve finally exploded and yelled "ALL RIGHT! These chips don't work. Stop production!!!!" Definitely a guy you don't want to work for.

  25. Loki's own staff would die before they did this on The Hacking Contest Nobody Tried to Win · · Score: 3

    Well no programmer of Loki's ever wrote 100,000 lines of code that they couldn't leave the showroom with and got hired by Loki. Maybe the learning experience is enough for the first 2 years of a hacker's life but eventually you want to expand your goals to not just learning but producing something you can use after you're done coding it.

    You have to start looking at costs and benefits of doing these things more and more and coding just for the experience less and less. Loki's programmers all have degrees in CS and very high grades, and whatever open source projects they did in the past were a tiny blip when they got hired. So as your student loans default one by one you're going to need to think more and more about where you put your volunteering.