However, saying that "it runs on Windows, so that's what you Linux guys oughta use" is truly moronic and has no basis in law.
But that's not what the opinion says. The opinion says, paraphrased:
The defendants *said* that they simply wanted to be able to play their DVDs on Linux.
DeCSS runs on a variety of systems, including Windows.
There are already licensed CSS-based players for Windows, yet the authors of the program extended its functionality to include such computers.
So the authors core claim is false. It may be that they intended to make the code work on some systems for which DVD was unavailable, but they obviously had broader motives than that.
The opinion is much more subtle than people appear to have recognized. The judge didn't say "you guys should stick to the established standard", what he said was "If you just wanted to not need to stick to the established standard, then why did you put in extra work to subvert legal versions there, too?" That's a really good question, folks.
Actually, no. I'm not familiar with the Sphinx-2 acoustic modelling architecture, but if they've used the modified auditory nerve-based model popularized by the guys at Bell Labs in the early nineties, they'll do OK over the phone.
As to the language model data, there's a huge database of both acoustic and language data available for non-commercial use in Europe. (I'd have to look up the site.) So even if there isn't much data provided with the Sphinx-2 code, you can recover from that.
However, many of the cleverer representations used by the commercial firms (e.g. Dragon Systems) are patented, and if they're in the code, then the submitters could be in deep trouble. Remember, publishing does not invalidate a patent; in fact, peple are encouraged to publish patented ideas.
Thank you Alexander Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson would like to speak with you.
And Sally Jeffords would like to speak to you. It's awfully hard to take Jefferson the rapist terribly seriously when he talks about the rights and powers of individuals.
Jury nullification does exist; juries can simply refuse to convict or to hold liable. Hell, Microsoft was found liable for unfair trade practicies earlier this year--and fined $1. That's the moral equivalent of nullification. However, judges have the authority to declare a mistrial in the case of significant misconduct by the members of a jury.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are different beasts. FreeBSD is somewhat faster and more stable; it runs ipfw and natd. OpenBSD is somewhat slower and more secure; it runs ipnat. The difference between the two systems is rather greater than that between 2.2 and 2.3. I can't speak about 2.4...but, then again, neith can you. There aren't any Linux 2.4 kernels.
Re:Pshaw! This one's easy!
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 1
PM Monday -> P. M. Montag (P. Monsieur Montag) -> P. Mr. Montag.
That's a problem with using the Fish to hide your writing style. It not only mangles your voice, but also your content.
I first read Childhoood's End immediately after the first moon landing, so perhaps my opinions are as dated as Clarke's. I think that anyone who reads it today needs to understand how jarring and rvolutionary it was when it was published.
It's a book about aliens landing, a literary tradition going back to The War of the Worlds. It's unique in that the aliens just don't care. They neither love us nor hate us; at best, they feel a certain distant benevolence. Humanity doesn't matter very much; at best, it's just another one of many races that will evolve to the next stage, and at worst, it's a cancer to be expunged.
This is actually a frequent theme of Clarke's work, and it may be his greatest single contribution to speculative fiction. Most authors write about humanity as if it matters; Clarke repeatedly rubs our face in the fact that we don't matter on a universal scale. We only matter to ourselves.
There's actually an interesting historical note here. I'd wager that almost nobody reading this would admit to having ever read any significant body of work directly influenced by Existentialism. That's not true: the conflict in Childhood's End, and, more importantly, in Sentinel and 2001 is exactly the Existentialist dilemma: how can one act well in a world where one does not matter.
And the next time somebody sneers at you for your taste in literature, point that out to them. Eat you heart out, Jean-Paul Sartre!
He doesn't support Windows Powered devices! I mean, if Excel makes him unhappy, then Pocket Excel on a Windows CE PocketPC should really get him going!
Yes, Linux does seem like a good choice. If you compare [Linux] with Windows CE, it is alot [sic] smaller and not as heavy on memory. (compare windows CE devices and Palm OS devices.)
Hmm. I like Linux as much as the next FreeBSD geek, but, frankly, no, you're wrong. (What follows uses the acronym CE in two different senses. CE means Consumer Electronics, in the EU sense; it also means Windows CE. I'll try to use CE device(s) for the former and Windows CE for the latter.)
(1) Linux is not small by the standards of CE devices. It's important to distinguish between kernel size (the Linux kernel is fairly small) and operating size (running Linux w/ X and Mozilla...that's not small, even by desktop standards, to say nothing of device standards.)
(2) The Windows CE-based systems you mention carry a vast amount of baggage. If you're comparing a Palm Pilot to a (say) Compaq Aero, you're comparing aples to oranges. The Aero not only contains Windows CE itself, it also contains GWES.EXE (CE's equivalent of X), SHELL.EXE (CE's equivalent of the WM), a handwriting recognizer, a soft input panel, and a lot of other software. There are Windows CE-based embedded systems that carry a lot less baggage; believe it or not, they're quite slim, trim, and stable.
A better comparison is to linuxce plus microwindows/NanoGUI. The linuxce guys are having a lot of trouble getting things to fit in the Windows CE palm-sized device format. They're having a good deal less trouble getting things to fit in the VR form factor. Frankly, that isn't surprising; X windows was really designed for a device with a keyboard and a lot of power. It isn't terribly well suited to a keyboardless, low-power device. If they're having trouble with microwindows, then true X will be even worse...and unstable to boot! Not a good user experience.
(3) And, finally, Linux still doesn't have a number of features that really are important for CE devices: things like quick on/off, recovery from unplugging, etc. I don't expect that those will be available in any context for quite a while.
Frankly, this sounds like marketing hype to me. M$ is releasing a new generation of their Palm-pilot class devices today at CES (or so cnet whould have us believe.) Intel is trying to snub them. The Wall-street journal reports that Intel is not even demoing devices, for heaven's sake, just talking about the plans?
A stock tends to rise (fairly sharply) during the interval between the announcement of the split and the split itself. After that period, the stock tends to flatten, or even fall. Companies that break this rule tend to either have inadequate revenue or revenue growth to support their stock price in the first place (e.g. Red Hat) or come in with sharp positive earnings surprises in the quarters immediately following their split (e.g. Microsoft after its penultimate split, but not after its most recent split).
Since Sony is a healthy company with reasonable, but not stellar, growth prospects, one would expect it to follow the normal pattern. The PS2 could make a difference if it is dramatically better than anything else out there, but, given the recent success of the Dreamcast console, that does seem somewhat unlikely.
It's all a government conspiracy!
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
To hide the real problem: Y5G! In 5 billion years, THE SUN IS GOING TO GO OUT! What are you doing about that?
Re:Serial and Parallel in a SchizoPhrenic article?
on
Future I/O Standards
·
· Score: 1
These two posts are awesome! I agree that the author is deliberately hiding some key details under the rug, and I wonder if he has a commercial reason for doing so. Don't get me wrong: serial is very cool. It's easier to string a bunch of devices onto the same (properly terminated) cable than it is to build a long, synchronous, parallel bus. But the key issue is synchronous vs. asynchronous, not parallel vs. serial. It is quite true that parallel synchronous busses with hardware arbitration schemes are pushing their upper limits...but
The next generation busses are only pushing the cost of disambiguating signals from hardware onto software.
This may be a good engineering decision. Feature for feature, software/firmware is and always has been much cheaper than hardware. But that flexibility comes at a cost: simply put, more features means more errors. Expect to see the software arbitration schemes for NGIO/FIO released on Flash ROM...so that errors can be patched.
Also, dynamic software arbitration schemes have a bunch of real hidden costs. There are the security costs (how can I keep my mouse from reading my password file?). There are the address assignment/boot-up time costs. But most importantly, there are the overhead costs of the protocol itself. The nominal bandwidth of a serial line employing a software arbitration protocol is much higher than its actual bandwidth. Parallel busses have real limitations, but we know that they really can send information at their nominal saturation rate. Serial busses can't.
Bottom line: serial isn't necessarily better than parallel. Performance will not improve as much as it seems. And those gains will come at the cost of incompatibility and instability.
Given the religious nature of the discussion, it seems to me that it would have sufficed to suggest to the guy that he render his orthography consonant with his orthodoxy.
He'd have been no more likely to recognize the content of the correction any more than he'd have understood that it was not a good thing to be a paradiorthotist...but at least he'd have understood that he'd been dissed.
There's a small factual error in the text of the original item. Marshall didn't actually suggest the Marshall plan, nor was he its main author. Truman and Acheson were. In fact, I don't think that Marshall should be the man of the century. But I think that the plan which bears his name should certainly be the Plan of the Century, as it was a brilliantly executed combination of Wilsonian generosity with Trumanian grit, smarts, and cunning which almost certainly changed the world.
Marshall took the credit for the plan, even though he didn't want it. The reason was purely political: Truman and Acheson were facing a strongly Republican Congress, and had their names been publically attached to the plan, then it would have become a political football, and it would have failed. Marshall, widely seen as a military hero, was immune to the personal attacks that would have been levelled against the other two. So he was nominated to receive an burden he didn't want -- responsibility for the "Marshall" plan's passage.
And it worked. And, more importantly, the plan worked. It was largely seen as a foreign rebuilding plan, since it spent a lot of money in Central Europe rebuilding economies there. But it was more than that: the Marshall plan was also the formation of NATO, the Breton Woods agreements, and the fomenting of the EU.
Truman, Acheson, and Marshall all saw that the conditions which had spawned Hitler after World War I had been recreated in even larger scale after World War II. Even looking back with half a century's perspective, it still seems overwhelmingly probable that another central European tyrant would have sprung up spouting some form of nationalistic doctrine, rebuilt his country by rebuilding its army, and exploited the disaffection of the poor in his nation.
Unlike the situation before WWI, he'd have been backed by the Soviet Union. He'd have had nuclear weapons, and he'd have marched across Europe in an eyeblink, leaving behind a wasteland. Likely, the rest of the world would have followed.
The Marshall plan was brilliant: by providing artificial stability to Europe, it removed the worst of the conditions under which another German Hitler could arise. It gave the US a way to keep the USSR from buying its way into another world war. In the long run, it created the modern Europe, stable and unified, and able to emerge in its rightful place as a single major power.
And as evidence of this, consider the recent events in the former Yugoslavia. The EU failed miserably and humiliatingly in Bosnia, but contained that conflict to Yugoslavia. It handled the resulting refugee crises in Italy and Austria with relative aplomb. It couldn't handle Yugoslavia's neo-fascist aggression against Kosovo, but through its subset of states common to the EU and to NATO, it could provide a significant armed force to help turn the tide. And it has now finally, fifty years after the end of WWII, decided on framework for a transnational military force in Europe. It can pay for that force, and the European powers understand that they collectively need such a force, but that no one of them needs such a force. This is finally a recipe for stability in the twentieth century's dark continent.
Yes, the plan had limitations, the worst of which was that it really treated Britain badly. No accomodation was made to lift the burdens of lend-lease, and so Great Britain suffered terribly during the fifties and sixties. That's also partly politics, unfortunately: the Republicans have never really quite forgiven FDR for being right about Hitler. They took pleasure in stabbing his memory in the back by refusing to reschedule Britain's lead-lease debt.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not what the opinion says. The opinion says, paraphrased:
- The defendants *said* that they simply wanted to be able to play their DVDs on Linux.
- DeCSS runs on a variety of systems, including Windows.
- There are already licensed CSS-based players for Windows, yet the authors of the program extended its functionality to include such computers.
- So the authors core claim is false. It may be that they intended to make the code work on some systems for which DVD was unavailable, but they obviously had broader motives than that.
The opinion is much more subtle than people appear to have recognized. The judge didn't say "you guys should stick to the established standard", what he said was "If you just wanted to not need to stick to the established standard, then why did you put in extra work to subvert legal versions there, too?" That's a really good question, folks.As to the language model data, there's a huge database of both acoustic and language data available for non-commercial use in Europe. (I'd have to look up the site.) So even if there isn't much data provided with the Sphinx-2 code, you can recover from that.
However, many of the cleverer representations used by the commercial firms (e.g. Dragon Systems) are patented, and if they're in the code, then the submitters could be in deep trouble. Remember, publishing does not invalidate a patent; in fact, peple are encouraged to publish patented ideas.
And Sally Jeffords would like to speak to you. It's awfully hard to take Jefferson the rapist terribly seriously when he talks about the rights and powers of individuals.
Jury nullification does exist; juries can simply refuse to convict or to hold liable. Hell, Microsoft was found liable for unfair trade practicies earlier this year--and fined $1. That's the moral equivalent of nullification. However, judges have the authority to declare a mistrial in the case of significant misconduct by the members of a jury.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are different beasts. FreeBSD is somewhat faster and more stable; it runs ipfw and natd. OpenBSD is somewhat slower and more secure; it runs ipnat. The difference between the two systems is rather greater than that between 2.2 and 2.3. I can't speak about 2.4...but, then again, neith can you. There aren't any Linux 2.4 kernels.
PM Monday -> P. M. Montag (P. Monsieur Montag) -> P. Mr. Montag.
That's a problem with using the Fish to hide your writing style. It not only mangles your voice, but also your content.
It's a book about aliens landing, a literary tradition going back to The War of the Worlds. It's unique in that the aliens just don't care. They neither love us nor hate us; at best, they feel a certain distant benevolence. Humanity doesn't matter very much; at best, it's just another one of many races that will evolve to the next stage, and at worst, it's a cancer to be expunged.
This is actually a frequent theme of Clarke's work, and it may be his greatest single contribution to speculative fiction. Most authors write about humanity as if it matters; Clarke repeatedly rubs our face in the fact that we don't matter on a universal scale. We only matter to ourselves.
There's actually an interesting historical note here. I'd wager that almost nobody reading this would admit to having ever read any significant body of work directly influenced by Existentialism. That's not true: the conflict in Childhood's End, and, more importantly, in Sentinel and 2001 is exactly the Existentialist dilemma: how can one act well in a world where one does not matter.
And the next time somebody sneers at you for your taste in literature, point that out to them. Eat you heart out, Jean-Paul Sartre!
"Live, from Madison Square Gardens! The New York Rangers versus the Redmond Blue Screens of Death!"
Hey, baby, it's got promise...real promise.
He doesn't support Windows Powered devices! I mean, if Excel makes him unhappy, then Pocket Excel on a Windows CE PocketPC should really get him going!
Hmm. I like Linux as much as the next FreeBSD geek, but, frankly, no, you're wrong. (What follows uses the acronym CE in two different senses. CE means Consumer Electronics, in the EU sense; it also means Windows CE. I'll try to use CE device(s) for the former and Windows CE for the latter.)
(1) Linux is not small by the standards of CE devices. It's important to distinguish between kernel size (the Linux kernel is fairly small) and operating size (running Linux w/ X and Mozilla...that's not small, even by desktop standards, to say nothing of device standards.)
(2) The Windows CE-based systems you mention carry a vast amount of baggage. If you're comparing a Palm Pilot to a (say) Compaq Aero, you're comparing aples to oranges. The Aero not only contains Windows CE itself, it also contains GWES.EXE (CE's equivalent of X), SHELL.EXE (CE's equivalent of the WM), a handwriting recognizer, a soft input panel, and a lot of other software. There are Windows CE-based embedded systems that carry a lot less baggage; believe it or not, they're quite slim, trim, and stable.
A better comparison is to linuxce plus microwindows/NanoGUI. The linuxce guys are having a lot of trouble getting things to fit in the Windows CE palm-sized device format. They're having a good deal less trouble getting things to fit in the VR form factor. Frankly, that isn't surprising; X windows was really designed for a device with a keyboard and a lot of power. It isn't terribly well suited to a keyboardless, low-power device. If they're having trouble with microwindows, then true X will be even worse...and unstable to boot! Not a good user experience.
(3) And, finally, Linux still doesn't have a number of features that really are important for CE devices: things like quick on/off, recovery from unplugging, etc. I don't expect that those will be available in any context for quite a while.
Frankly, this sounds like marketing hype to me. M$ is releasing a new generation of their Palm-pilot class devices today at CES (or so cnet whould have us believe.) Intel is trying to snub them. The Wall-street journal reports that Intel is not even demoing devices, for heaven's sake, just talking about the plans?
Naah, this is vaporware and FUD, no more.
And it's important.
A stock tends to rise (fairly sharply) during the interval between the announcement of the split and the split itself. After that period, the stock tends to flatten, or even fall. Companies that break this rule tend to either have inadequate revenue or revenue growth to support their stock price in the first place (e.g. Red Hat) or come in with sharp positive earnings surprises in the quarters immediately following their split (e.g. Microsoft after its penultimate split, but not after its most recent split).
Since Sony is a healthy company with reasonable, but not stellar, growth prospects, one would expect it to follow the normal pattern. The PS2 could make a difference if it is dramatically better than anything else out there, but, given the recent success of the Dreamcast console, that does seem somewhat unlikely.
To hide the real problem: Y5G! In 5 billion years, THE SUN IS GOING TO GO OUT! What are you doing about that?
The next generation busses are only pushing the cost of disambiguating signals from hardware onto software.
This may be a good engineering decision. Feature for feature, software/firmware is and always has been much cheaper than hardware. But that flexibility comes at a cost: simply put, more features means more errors. Expect to see the software arbitration schemes for NGIO/FIO released on Flash ROM...so that errors can be patched.
Also, dynamic software arbitration schemes have a bunch of real hidden costs. There are the security costs (how can I keep my mouse from reading my password file?). There are the address assignment/boot-up time costs. But most importantly, there are the overhead costs of the protocol itself. The nominal bandwidth of a serial line employing a software arbitration protocol is much higher than its actual bandwidth. Parallel busses have real limitations, but we know that they really can send information at their nominal saturation rate. Serial busses can't.
Bottom line: serial isn't necessarily better than parallel. Performance will not improve as much as it seems. And those gains will come at the cost of incompatibility and instability.
He'd have been no more likely to recognize the content of the correction any more than he'd have understood that it was not a good thing to be a paradiorthotist...but at least he'd have understood that he'd been dissed.
There's a small factual error in the text of the original item. Marshall didn't actually suggest the Marshall plan, nor was he its main author. Truman and Acheson were. In fact, I don't think that Marshall should be the man of the century. But I think that the plan which bears his name should certainly be the Plan of the Century, as it was a brilliantly executed combination of Wilsonian generosity with Trumanian grit, smarts, and cunning which almost certainly changed the world.
Marshall took the credit for the plan, even though he didn't want it. The reason was purely political: Truman and Acheson were facing a strongly Republican Congress, and had their names been publically attached to the plan, then it would have become a political football, and it would have failed. Marshall, widely seen as a military hero, was immune to the personal attacks that would have been levelled against the other two. So he was nominated to receive an burden he didn't want -- responsibility for the "Marshall" plan's passage.
And it worked. And, more importantly, the plan worked. It was largely seen as a foreign rebuilding plan, since it spent a lot of money in Central Europe rebuilding economies there. But it was more than that: the Marshall plan was also the formation of NATO, the Breton Woods agreements, and the fomenting of the EU.
Truman, Acheson, and Marshall all saw that the conditions which had spawned Hitler after World War I had been recreated in even larger scale after World War II. Even looking back with half a century's perspective, it still seems overwhelmingly probable that another central European tyrant would have sprung up spouting some form of nationalistic doctrine, rebuilt his country by rebuilding its army, and exploited the disaffection of the poor in his nation.
Unlike the situation before WWI, he'd have been backed by the Soviet Union. He'd have had nuclear weapons, and he'd have marched across Europe in an eyeblink, leaving behind a wasteland. Likely, the rest of the world would have followed.
The Marshall plan was brilliant: by providing artificial stability to Europe, it removed the worst of the conditions under which another German Hitler could arise. It gave the US a way to keep the USSR from buying its way into another world war. In the long run, it created the modern Europe, stable and unified, and able to emerge in its rightful place as a single major power.
And as evidence of this, consider the recent events in the former Yugoslavia. The EU failed miserably and humiliatingly in Bosnia, but contained that conflict to Yugoslavia. It handled the resulting refugee crises in Italy and Austria with relative aplomb. It couldn't handle Yugoslavia's neo-fascist aggression against Kosovo, but through its subset of states common to the EU and to NATO, it could provide a significant armed force to help turn the tide. And it has now finally, fifty years after the end of WWII, decided on framework for a transnational military force in Europe. It can pay for that force, and the European powers understand that they collectively need such a force, but that no one of them needs such a force. This is finally a recipe for stability in the twentieth century's dark continent.
Yes, the plan had limitations, the worst of which was that it really treated Britain badly. No accomodation was made to lift the burdens of lend-lease, and so Great Britain suffered terribly during the fifties and sixties. That's also partly politics, unfortunately: the Republicans have never really quite forgiven FDR for being right about Hitler. They took pleasure in stabbing his memory in the back by refusing to reschedule Britain's lead-lease debt.