As someone who just loves books.. most are not printed on acid free paper anymore and a huge amount of them is going to be lost within the next 10 to 30 years.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon in our university library. Up until the 1930's somewhere, journals are pretty well preserved. Then they suddenly get awful as paper mills switched to new methods. Pages are yellowed and brittle. In the 1950's the error was discovered and pages become white again with the switch back to acid-free paper.
Let's hope we don't make the same mistake with digital media. And it could be worse: almost all the film from the first half of the century is lost to self-rot and enviromental damage. For all its faults, DVD is probably the best thing that's ever happened to film from a historical perspective.
This is a very real problem, but it won't amount to an apocalypse unless we ignore the issue.
As others have pointed out, the exponential increase in storage capacity makes it relatively easy to "keep buying more disk" and migrating your data all the time. Certainly the convenience of having everything online is nice, too. And everything on line should have periodic backups happening. I've managed to do this for the past decade with my data, but I've lost the eight or so years before that, and I miss some it.
But there's logical as well as physical bitrot. The media itself deteriorates, making it hard to get the information back, but understanding what that bitstream represents after a few years can be a real problem. If you've got binary word processor files from an Apple2 or C64, you'll probably not be able the read them unless you also have the binary and can get it running in an emulator. Given the amazing progress that's been made in the last 150 years deciphering the records of dead civilizations, I wouldn't say that reading your MS Word 5 documents will be impossible in twenty years, but it might not be worth the effort. Open standards and open source really help alot with this issue. If you can find a document describing the file format, you're saved. And the same applies to hardware formats. Also, it's much easier to keep open source software alive--essentially carrying the 'make a copy on the new system' over to executables.
I'd say the solution is pretty much that simple: keep track of your data, plan to make a complete copy every 5-10 years, and choose formats and that are publicly documented and that (you hope) will be easy for future software to support.
The current state of streaming media seems to be a joke. I have found some radio programs I would like to listen to, but the "high speed" feeds are for 28.8 modems and stream at 16kbps. The quality is horrid. Its a shame, considering I have ADSL. I want a 128kbps feed for audio, until then I think it is just a novelty and to painful to listen to. I wonder if the broadcasting industry will legally prevent high quality streaming media.
This remains sadly true for the majority of commerical audio sources on the net. But you have heard of shoutcast and icecast? Both sites have a directory service listing mp3 streams, an number of which are 128kbps or greater. That offers excellent quality, better than fm radio, if I can compare apples and oranges.
I live in an area with poor broadcast radio coverage, so this has been an invaluable service for me in finding new music. And it's really nice not to have to listen to commercials.:)
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house.
Can you provide a reference for this? Or better yet, a link to the GPL'd code?
I offered to help them during the call for developers in April/June 1998. However, I changed my mind when they refused to consider putting the code under any sort of Open Source license. I'd be very disappointed if they had done a GPL'd release, since I was quite interested in participating otherwise. The licence was my only objection: in fact, I remember arguing that the non-free license would hurt their ability to attract developers!
The last version of the code I have is version 1.4a from 1998 June 22, and it contains no license of any sort.
"This is a breakthrough for the Linux market," stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. "For the first time, developers will have access to a high-performance, fully native Linux graphics platform."
This is a great slap in the face to those who've been working hard on the utah-glx project for the past 9 months. That effort has certainly produced a very fast and capable matrox driver, and the new ati ragepro driver is coming along nicely.
Of course, while there's no mention 'open source' they don't say it won't be either. I would be hopeful because of VA's involvement, except they quote Brian Miles, vp marketing at VA Linux Systems: "We are excited to collaborate with NVIDIA and SGI to help create high performance, standards-compliant products in the Linux workstation space, complementing the work we contribute to the open source community in the Mesa and XFree86 projects."
It's too bad so many people have bought nvidia cards While they do make good hardware, their windowsland reputation as "the thing to get" is completely inappropriate in the context of free software. If you care at all about the principles of open development at all, save your money for more supportive vendors. Matrox was the first to release 3d specs, and their G200/G400 cards are well supported. The staunch ATI and 3Dfx have recently completely reversed their policies and opened development.
I see this as one of the great triumphs of the past year. Until nvidia joins in, we should avoid them like the plague.
The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.
This webnoise article, linked on slashdot in may is probably what's being referred to here. The comment in question is toward the end of the article.
Now, generally people say this sort of thing for two reasons. Most commonly, they actually believe that no one else on the planet is as smart/knowlegeable/experienced as they are, and couldn't possibly produce rocket science of the requisite level. This is despressingly common, and one of the psychological hurdles (like fear of being judged on work-in-progress as if it's the best one could do in a polished effort) that holds people back from adopting open development practices. This is another strain of what RMS called the Cathedral style of development. It's what was said about writing compilers, operating system kernels and desktop applications, and I don't buy it here either.
The other reason is when the authors are trying to create a aura of "professionalization" around their work, usually so they can remain well placed in their employer's finances. The arguments are similar: "We're trained professionals. Do not try this at home," but the motivation usually has more to do with greed (or at least comfort) than fear.
Neither of these arguments are in line with the values of Open Source, and they amount to arrogant selfishness from that point of view. I'm not arguing that codec design doesn't require specialized knowledge, clever research, etc. Just that it's a fallacy that no one but Eric Schrier &c. can do it.
He did make some other points that a little harder to refute. For example, that the unfair 'fair licensing' patent situation is an historic artefact of the designing bodies being large corporations I can't dispute. He also makes the argument that allowing patented technology into the mpeg standard helps ensure that major corporate players use the standard, that the standard includes the best technology, and that the best technology be patented, rather than buried in an undisclosed proprietary standard. This appears to be well-reasoned, and is certainly consistent with his other claims.
I differ about this being the best course, mostly based on what we've learned about network effects and life in an exponentially-growing market. And vis á vis the dvd stuff, it appears that patents are more restrictive than trade secrets in an open source context.
If you are experiencing pain from typing and mousing an ergonomic keyboard won't help. Not by itself. You are over-using or at least mis-using your muscles and you need to slow down.
This is probably the best advice. I've flirted with wrist pain from computer use, but so far avoided a full-on case. Other things that help:
Mouse left-handed (or right-handed if you normally use your left) This takes some getting used to, but helped a great deal in my case, and in several others I know. If you can an asymetric mouse (like some of the microsoft ones) you may have to get a new one for this to be confortable, however.
There are exercises you can do. The one I was taught was to hold my arm straight out and bend the hand down (using my free hand) just to the point where it feels like a stretch. It helps to rotate your arm to your elbow is pointing down. Hold for 15 seconds, then bend and hold your hand up, rotating your arm so your elbow points up. Again hold for 15 minutes. Repeat three times, then do the other arm. Great for passing the time during those breaks every 20 minutes. Though you should probably consult a physical therapist for the correct way to do this and other exercises.:)
In my experience, using the mouse is definitely more of a strain than the keyboard, and switching between them all the time is even worse, so I'd think some kind of ergonomic keyboard and avoiding the mouse would help. Be sure your typing posture is correct, as well. You should be sitting, back straight, feet flat on the floor, with your forearms completely horizontal. Keep your elbows in, and don't reset them or your wrists on anything. That compresses nerves. Also, your monitor should be high enough to be at eye level in this position. You want to be looking down about 10 degrees from straight ahead. Note that all this can be rather difficult to arrange with standard office furniture. If you work for a good company, they'll get you keyboard tray and a monitor stand. If not, rig something.:)
The glide code is under yet another source license. At first glance, it sounds DFSG-free, claiming to be GPL-ish with exceptions for code not explicitly derived from the original code. I'm not sure what they're trying for there that the lgpl doesn't cover. Porting glide to your proprietary card seems like an example.
Here's the preamble:
program interface (API).The license is intended to offer terms similar to some standard General Public Licenses designed to foster open standards and unrestricted accessibility to source code. Some of these licenses require that, as a condition of the license of the software, any derivative works (that is, new software which is a work containing the original program or a portion of it) must be available for general use, without restriction other than for a minor transfer fee, and that the source code for such derivative works must likewise be made available. The only restriction is that such derivative works must be subject to the same General Public License terms as the original work. This 3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License differs from the standard licenses of this type in that it does not require the entire derivative work to be made available under the terms of this license nor is the recipient required to make available the source code for the entire derivative work. Rather, the license is limited to only the identifiable portion of the derivative work that is derived from the licensed software. The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.
I noticed two obvious hitches:
section 3.2(f) says: You do not make any use of the GLIDE trademark without the prior written permission of 3dfx.
And yet, a la GPL, you must insure that all recipients receive a copy or be referred to "this License" which is defined as the "3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License". Hmmm.
I'd guess this is an oversight, since they seem to be attempting to hold to the spirit of the GPL.
Also, section 4.2 says: If the distribution and/or use of the Program or Derivative Works is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.
This seems to say they can take away one's right to redistribute at any time, especially since the readme lists a number of US patent numbers. This seems like a real show-stopper.
its not like rpm is some closed proprietary standard.
No, it's not. But distributing source only in one packaging format is just plain impolite. It's saying to non-rpm distibutions, "We just don't care about you and your users. You should have to use our tools because they're popular over here where we live." That's the attitude I have trouble with. It's as insensitive as emailing MS Word documents to strangers.
It's fine to offer.src.rpms as an option, but we already have a lowest-common denominator for souce code in the *nix world. It's called tar.gz.
I'm sorry, their spin on this really sucks. All of the articles they've done have been thoroughly hysterical. The "piracy" issue has been argued to death here and elsewhere with mp3's. DVD video is much the same.
It's hardly a surprise that the scrambler was broken. One of the things the author of the wired article keeps misrepresenting is that XING somehow "forgot to encrypt" their decryption key. The CSS license requires implementations to obfuscate the algorithm (this is security through obscurity, after all). This is what XING failed to do, which made dissassembly much easier. It's quite possible to obtain the keys from other players--it just takes more work. In any case, the scrambler quite weak and would have been broken anyway. In fact, Bruce Schneier mentions in this cryptogram that the DVD cipher was broken "within months of [its] disclosure." What's new here is public documentation, unencumbered by NDA, not that news the the algorithm is fundamentally flawed.
As this new article briefly mentions, many of us are working on this just so we can watch the damn movies we've bought. Please see the livid project for a good collection of current open source work in this direction. The list archives have some intelligent discussion of the CSS crack, including "That was too easy!" hypotheses for the conspiracy theorists.:)
There's still a lot of work to be done. We can unscramble encrypted movies now, but there's still the byzantine navigation file format to figure out...which actually seems to be a much harder problem.
I just wrote to cheapbytes and asked about their dvd plans.
Basically, they said "not yet." The price-per-disk is coming down nicely, but the hefty set-up cost makes them wary of titles that won't sell well. They're waiting for better market penetration of the drives.
Incremental linking also helps. With the linux version, the whole program has to be linked from scratch every time. VC however just relinks the object files that have changed, when possible. I'd really like to be able to write games using emacs and GCC again, but the compile times for large projects really need to come down.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but you can fake some of this by linking each subdirectory separately, then rolling everything together. That way make takes care of the piecewise updates as per normal. I've mostly seen that with library code, though. Not sure if it could be applied to an executable.
Re metric time: there's always the swatch beat internet time. The day is divided into 1000 units (beats). No timezones, which is nice for networked and space applications.
A place to start, anyway. At least you can buy watches that display it.
The modified julian day is another standard in use, particularly in astronomy.
Hey Rob, can we get these added to the slashdot date formats, along with unix epoch?
As a scientist I've always leaned toward keeping the second as a fundamental unit, just to make converting easier. Makes things like 'standard business hours' hard to support, but that's an outdated concept anyway.:-)
I'd like to point out that there's an open collaboration also working on producing IBM's design. I doubt we're going to ultimately price competitive with large motherboard manufacturers, but we may be faster, and we're dedicated to keeping design improvements free and available. "Open Source" for hardware, as it were.
It's hard to say anything concrete until IBM releases the design but we're aiming for a US$500-$700 box.
I've been trying to find the schematics for this since last friday's article. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on the website, and no one's returned my email so far. Perhaps they're thinking similar things to what's been expressed in this thread.
I did find schematics for the earlier reference designs that have been pointed out as counter-hype:
There's no license on either of these, though, so it may be the 'free' part that's new.
To counterflame:
Hardware designs can benifit from open development in all the same ways that software can--faster development, better designs through the pooling of resources and peer-review. Our community can benefit in the same way as well--no one can take control of your computer away from you. How dare you flame someone for wanting to hack!?
Yes, prototyping hardware is expensive, but a large part of that is because fabs are designed for mass production runs. There's a fixed cost associated with setting up a particular design, whether your making a couple of prototypes or 10,000 units. I bet we could design a fab for low-volume production that would be the other way around. And no, it's not cheaper, but it's definitely possible to build motherboards in your garage.
What really bothers me here are the off hand dismissal of a call for openness. Are you trolling? Remember, amateurs can't write production quality software. Something as serious as an application suite (I won't even speak of an operating system) can only be designed by a qualified team of professionals, and their work costs $100 per line of code. What are you going to do, hire some college kid to do it?
The author's putting forth the idea that it's the process of open source development that's Art, not the code or the program (they're art with a small 'a').
One of the characteristics of Art is that it challenges those who encounter it to see the world in new ways.
If you meant just that the design is untried, I suppose this won't convince you, though optical computers of this sort have been build (on a much smaller scale) before. Anyway, we have this thing called "engineering" for figuring out if something's going to work or not.:)
I don't seen any new information on the web. Can someone from the conference let us know what progress has been made on the design front?
I've been looking for this "free motherboard design" and don't see any mention of it on ibm's website. Has anyone else had any luck finding it?
Already sent a note to the author of the MacWeek article, so no need to mail bomb them. Can't seem to find an address for Steve Faure, and there's only a link to the story on linuxppc.com. I'll post more info if I hear anything back.
As for one-offs, I think that's a great idea! I suspect you want to run at least a thousand, though--that way they'll only be fantastically expensive./. brand motherboards, indeed!
Also, is there a way to convert Macintosh bitmap fonts for display on XFree?
Cut and paste from a screenshot?
I don't know of any tools, but it should be fairly simple to write a converter. The font format is described in Inside Macintosh: Text, specifically here.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who just loves books .. most are not printed on acid free paper anymore and a huge amount of them is going to be lost within the next 10 to 30 years.
I'm sorry to hear that. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon in our university library. Up until the 1930's somewhere, journals are pretty well preserved. Then they suddenly get awful as paper mills switched to new methods. Pages are yellowed and brittle. In the 1950's the error was discovered and pages become white again with the switch back to acid-free paper.
Let's hope we don't make the same mistake with digital media. And it could be worse: almost all the film from the first half of the century is lost to self-rot and enviromental damage. For all its faults, DVD is probably the best thing that's ever happened to film from a historical perspective.
This is a very real problem, but it won't amount to an apocalypse unless we ignore the issue.
As others have pointed out, the exponential increase in storage capacity makes it relatively easy to "keep buying more disk" and migrating your data all the time. Certainly the convenience of having everything online is nice, too. And everything on line should have periodic backups happening. I've managed to do this for the past decade with my data, but I've lost the eight or so years before that, and I miss some it.
But there's logical as well as physical bitrot. The media itself deteriorates, making it hard to get the information back, but understanding what that bitstream represents after a few years can be a real problem. If you've got binary word processor files from an Apple2 or C64, you'll probably not be able the read them unless you also have the binary and can get it running in an emulator. Given the amazing progress that's been made in the last 150 years deciphering the records of dead civilizations, I wouldn't say that reading your MS Word 5 documents will be impossible in twenty years, but it might not be worth the effort. Open standards and open source really help alot with this issue. If you can find a document describing the file format, you're saved. And the same applies to hardware formats. Also, it's much easier to keep open source software alive--essentially carrying the 'make a copy on the new system' over to executables.
I'd say the solution is pretty much that simple: keep track of your data, plan to make a complete copy every 5-10 years, and choose formats and that are publicly documented and that (you hope) will be easy for future software to support.
The current state of streaming media seems to be a joke. I have found some radio programs I would like to listen to, but the "high speed" feeds are for 28.8 modems and stream at 16kbps. The quality is horrid. Its a shame, considering I have ADSL. I want a 128kbps feed for audio, until then I think it is just a novelty and to painful to listen to. I wonder if the broadcasting industry will legally prevent high quality streaming media.
:)
This remains sadly true for the majority of commerical audio sources on the net. But you have heard of shoutcast and icecast? Both sites have a directory service listing mp3 streams, an number of which are 128kbps or greater. That offers excellent quality, better than fm radio, if I can compare apples and oranges.
I live in an area with poor broadcast radio coverage, so this has been an invaluable service for me in finding new music. And it's really nice not to have to listen to commercials.
Here's the article at WindowsMagazine that CNN was reporting on:
Fred Langra's column AOL 5.0: The Upgrade of Death?
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house.
Can you provide a reference for this? Or better yet, a link to the GPL'd code?
I offered to help them during the call for developers in April/June 1998. However, I changed my mind when they refused to consider putting the code under any sort of Open Source license. I'd be very disappointed if they had done a GPL'd release, since I was quite interested in participating otherwise. The licence was my only objection: in fact, I remember arguing that the non-free license would hurt their ability to attract developers!
The last version of the code I have is version 1.4a from 1998 June 22, and it contains no license of any sort.
"This is a breakthrough for the Linux market," stated Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. "For the first time, developers will have access to a high-performance, fully native Linux graphics platform."
This is a great slap in the face to those who've been working hard on the utah-glx project for the past 9 months. That effort has certainly produced a very fast and capable matrox driver, and the new ati ragepro driver is coming along nicely.
Of course, while there's no mention 'open source' they don't say it won't be either. I would be hopeful because of VA's involvement, except they quote Brian Miles, vp marketing at VA Linux Systems: "We are excited to collaborate with NVIDIA and SGI to help create high performance, standards-compliant products in the Linux workstation space, complementing the work we contribute to the open source community in the Mesa and XFree86 projects."
It's too bad so many people have bought nvidia cards While they do make good hardware, their windowsland reputation as "the thing to get" is completely inappropriate in the context of free software. If you care at all about the principles of open development at all, save your money for more supportive vendors. Matrox was the first to release 3d specs, and their G200/G400 cards are well supported. The staunch ATI and 3Dfx have recently completely reversed their policies and opened development.
I see this as one of the great triumphs of the past year. Until nvidia joins in, we should avoid them like the plague.
The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.
This webnoise article, linked on slashdot in may is probably what's being referred to here. The comment in question is toward the end of the article.
Now, generally people say this sort of thing for two reasons. Most commonly, they actually believe that no one else on the planet is as smart/knowlegeable/experienced as they are, and couldn't possibly produce rocket science of the requisite level. This is despressingly common, and one of the psychological hurdles (like fear of being judged on work-in-progress as if it's the best one could do in a polished effort) that holds people back from adopting open development practices. This is another strain of what RMS called the Cathedral style of development. It's what was said about writing compilers, operating system kernels and desktop applications, and I don't buy it here either.
The other reason is when the authors are trying to create a aura of "professionalization" around their work, usually so they can remain well placed in their employer's finances. The arguments are similar: "We're trained professionals. Do not try this at home," but the motivation usually has more to do with greed (or at least comfort) than fear.
Neither of these arguments are in line with the values of Open Source, and they amount to arrogant selfishness from that point of view. I'm not arguing that codec design doesn't require specialized knowledge, clever research, etc. Just that it's a fallacy that no one but Eric Schrier &c. can do it.
He did make some other points that a little harder to refute. For example, that the unfair 'fair licensing' patent situation is an historic artefact of the designing bodies being large corporations I can't dispute. He also makes the argument that allowing patented technology into the mpeg standard helps ensure that major corporate players use the standard, that the standard includes the best technology, and that the best technology be patented, rather than buried in an undisclosed proprietary standard. This appears to be well-reasoned, and is certainly consistent with his other claims.
I differ about this being the best course, mostly based on what we've learned about network effects and life in an exponentially-growing market. And vis á vis the dvd stuff, it appears that patents are more restrictive than trade secrets in an open source context.
There are some examples using a java applet to render the actual jpeg2k image clientside, which makes for a more impressive demonstration.
http://ltswww.epfl.ch/~neximage/de coder/applets/ They're very slow, though.
If you are experiencing pain from typing and mousing an ergonomic keyboard won't help. Not by itself. You are over-using or at least mis-using your muscles and you need to slow down.
:)
:)
This is probably the best advice. I've flirted with wrist pain from computer use, but so far avoided a full-on case. Other things that help:
Mouse left-handed (or right-handed if you normally use your left) This takes some getting used to, but helped a great deal in my case, and in several others I know. If you can an asymetric mouse (like some of the microsoft ones) you may have to get a new one for this to be confortable, however.
There are exercises you can do. The one I was taught was to hold my arm straight out and bend the hand down (using my free hand) just to the point where it feels like a stretch. It helps to rotate your arm to your elbow is pointing down. Hold for 15 seconds, then bend and hold your hand up, rotating your arm so your elbow points up. Again hold for 15 minutes. Repeat three times, then do the other arm. Great for passing the time during those breaks every 20 minutes. Though you should probably consult a physical therapist for the correct way to do this and other exercises.
In my experience, using the mouse is definitely more of a strain than the keyboard, and switching between them all the time is even worse, so I'd think some kind of ergonomic keyboard and avoiding the mouse would help. Be sure your typing posture is correct, as well. You should be sitting, back straight, feet flat on the floor, with your forearms completely horizontal. Keep your elbows in, and don't reset them or your wrists on anything. That compresses nerves. Also, your monitor should be high enough to be at eye level in this position. You want to be looking down about 10 degrees from straight ahead. Note that all this can be rather difficult to arrange with standard office furniture. If you work for a good company, they'll get you keyboard tray and a monitor stand. If not, rig something.
The glide code is under yet another source license. At first glance, it sounds DFSG-free, claiming to be GPL-ish with exceptions for code not explicitly derived from the original code. I'm not sure what they're trying for there that the lgpl doesn't cover. Porting glide to your proprietary card seems like an example.
Here's the preamble:
program interface (API).The license is intended to offer terms similar
to some standard General Public Licenses designed to foster open
standards and unrestricted accessibility to source code. Some of these
licenses require that, as a condition of the license of the software,
any derivative works (that is, new software which is a work containing
the original program or a portion of it) must be available for general
use, without restriction other than for a minor transfer fee, and that
the source code for such derivative works must likewise be made
available. The only restriction is that such derivative works must be
subject to the same General Public License terms as the original work.
This 3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License differs from the
standard licenses of this type in that it does not require the entire
derivative work to be made available under the terms of this license
nor is the recipient required to make available the source code for
the entire derivative work. Rather, the license is limited to only the
identifiable portion of the derivative work that is derived from the
licensed software. The precise terms and conditions for copying,
distribution and modification follow.
I noticed two obvious hitches:
section 3.2(f) says:
You do not make any use of the GLIDE trademark without the prior written permission of 3dfx.
And yet, a la GPL, you must insure that all recipients receive a copy or be referred to "this License" which is defined as the "3dfx GLIDE Source Code General Public License". Hmmm.
I'd guess this is an oversight, since they seem to be attempting to hold to the spirit of the GPL.
Also, section 4.2 says:
If the distribution and/or use of the Program or Derivative Works
is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted
interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under
this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation
excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in
or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License
incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.
This seems to say they can take away one's right to redistribute at any time, especially since the readme lists a number of US patent numbers. This seems like a real show-stopper.
Comments?
its not like rpm is some closed proprietary standard.
.src.rpms as an option, but we already have a lowest-common denominator for souce code in the *nix world. It's called tar.gz.
No, it's not. But distributing source only in one packaging format is just plain impolite. It's saying to non-rpm distibutions, "We just don't care about you and your users. You should have to use our tools because they're popular over here where we live." That's the attitude I have trouble with. It's as insensitive as emailing MS Word documents to strangers.
It's fine to offer
Well, Lycos lists only one Bill Seiler in California, in Newport Beach. I called him, and he's not it :)
There are quite a few William Seilers, though, and some bills in other states.
I'm now looking for a homepage...
I'm sorry, their spin on this really sucks. All of the articles they've done have been thoroughly hysterical. The "piracy" issue has been argued to death here and elsewhere with mp3's. DVD video is much the same.
:)
It's hardly a surprise that the scrambler was broken. One of the things the author of the wired article keeps misrepresenting is that XING somehow "forgot to encrypt" their decryption key. The CSS license requires implementations to obfuscate the algorithm (this is security through obscurity, after all). This is what XING failed to do, which made dissassembly much easier. It's quite possible to obtain the keys from other players--it just takes more work. In any case, the scrambler quite weak and would have been broken anyway. In fact, Bruce Schneier mentions in this cryptogram that the DVD cipher was broken "within months of [its] disclosure." What's new here is public documentation, unencumbered by NDA, not that news the the algorithm is fundamentally flawed.
As this new article briefly mentions, many of us are working on this just so we can watch the damn movies we've bought. Please see the livid project for a good collection of current open source work in this direction. The list archives have some intelligent discussion of the CSS crack, including "That was too easy!" hypotheses for the conspiracy theorists.
There's still a lot of work to be done. We can unscramble encrypted movies now, but there's still the byzantine navigation file format to figure out...which actually seems to be a much harder problem.
I just wrote to cheapbytes and asked about their dvd plans.
Basically, they said "not yet." The price-per-disk is coming down nicely, but the hefty set-up cost makes them wary of titles that won't sell well. They're waiting for better market penetration of the drives.
Incremental linking also helps. With the linux version, the whole program has
to be linked from scratch every time. VC however just relinks the object files that have changed, when possible. I'd
really like to be able to write games using emacs and GCC again, but the compile times for large projects really need
to come down.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but you can fake some of this by linking each subdirectory separately, then rolling everything together. That way make takes care of the piecewise updates as per normal. I've mostly seen that with library code, though. Not sure if it could be applied to an executable.
Re metric time: there's always the swatch beat internet time. The day is divided into 1000 units (beats). No timezones, which is nice for networked and space applications.
:-)
A place to start, anyway. At least you can buy watches that display it.
The modified julian day is another standard in use, particularly in astronomy.
Hey Rob, can we get these added to the slashdot date formats, along with unix epoch?
As a scientist I've always leaned toward keeping the second as a fundamental unit, just to make converting easier. Makes things like 'standard business hours' hard to support, but that's an outdated concept anyway.
No offense, 621 bogomips is damn good, but it's not exactly 3-5 times...
/proc/cpuinfo
raj$ uname -a
Linux raj 2.2.11 #4 Thu Aug 12 19:22:47 PDT 1999 i586 unknown
raj$ cat
processor : 0
[snip]
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping : 12
cpu MHz : 400.919133
[snip]
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mmx 3dnow
bogomips : 799.54
Your point?
I'd like to point out that there's an open collaboration also working on producing IBM's design. I doubt we're going to ultimately price competitive with large motherboard manufacturers, but we may be faster, and we're dedicated to keeping design improvements free and available. "Open Source" for hardware, as it were.
It's hard to say anything concrete until IBM releases the design but we're aiming for a US$500-$700 box.
Please subscribe to our mailing list if you're interested in participating.
The specs are at : ftp://ftp.aus tin.ibm.com/pub/PPC_support/reference_designs/long trail/
Thanks for the pointer!
I've been trying to find the schematics for this since last friday's article. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on the website, and no one's returned my email so far. Perhaps they're thinking similar things to what's been expressed in this thread.
I did find schematics for the earlier reference designs that have been pointed out as counter-hype:
1995 December dual 604 design
more recent 'spruce' 6xx/7xx reference board (uniprocessor, based on the CPC700 hostbridge)
There's no license on either of these, though, so it may be the 'free' part that's new.
To counterflame:
Hardware designs can benifit from open development in all the same ways that software can--faster development, better designs through the pooling of resources and peer-review. Our community can benefit in the same way as well--no one can take control of your computer away from you. How dare you flame someone for wanting to hack!?
Yes, prototyping hardware is expensive, but a large part of that is because fabs are designed for mass production runs. There's a fixed cost associated with setting up a particular design, whether your making a couple of prototypes or 10,000 units. I bet we could design a fab for low-volume production that would be the other way around. And no, it's not cheaper, but it's definitely possible to build motherboards in your garage.
What really bothers me here are the off hand dismissal of a call for openness. Are you trolling? Remember, amateurs can't write production quality software. Something as serious as an application suite (I won't even speak of an operating system) can only be designed by a qualified team of professionals, and their work costs $100 per line of code. What are you going to do, hire some college kid to do it?
[x86] will make things much easy for the newbies (which, in a few years, will greatly out number us).
The newbies have always outnumbered us. Exponential growth is like that.
What might be different is that we're getting users less interested in learning how things work.
Which part of the programming is the art?
The author's putting forth the idea that it's the process of open source development that's Art, not the code or the program (they're art with a small 'a').
One of the characteristics of Art is that it challenges those who encounter it to see the world in new ways.
... if for no other reason than a lack of information.
:)
A paper from the first announcement of this back in May is available in a couple of places (zipped eps and postscript), as well as an analysis by RSA. see also the RISKS posting.
If you meant just that the design is untried, I suppose this won't convince you, though optical computers of this sort have been build (on a much smaller scale) before. Anyway, we have this thing called "engineering" for figuring out if something's going to work or not.
I don't seen any new information on the web. Can someone from the conference let us know what progress has been made on the design front?
I've been looking for this "free motherboard design" and don't see any mention of it on ibm's website. Has anyone else had any luck finding it?
/. brand motherboards, indeed!
Already sent a note to the author of the MacWeek article, so no need to mail bomb them. Can't seem to find an address for Steve Faure, and there's only a link to the story on linuxppc.com. I'll post more info if I hear anything back.
As for one-offs, I think that's a great idea! I suspect you want to run at least a thousand, though--that way they'll only be fantastically expensive.
Also, is there a way to convert Macintosh bitmap fonts for display on XFree?
Cut and paste from a screenshot?
I don't know of any tools, but it should be fairly simple to write a converter. The font format is described in Inside Macintosh: Text, specifically here.
There are also so free tools available at fonts.apple.com.