> Say electrons move at 10^5 m/s (somebody help me out here)
Electrons in silicon and metal circuits only move at a few mm/s but the change in electrical potential moves along very rapidly (like waves in water).
A transistor in a microchip will switch when the fast moving wave moves a few extra electons into the semiconductor junction changing it's electrical properties.
With light, each photon will be a part of the signal itself, so you need to find a crystal which needs a certain number of photons entering on one axis in a given time to prevent photons from passing through another axis (or some similar mechanism). This should present no heat problem if excess photons simply pass through unimpeded - so you have a sort of photonic capacitance, a light equivalent to the FET.
Of course things are really much more complicated. --
But you're right. It's not good enough for a real news article. Perhaps they could be let off because it looks like Alan Cox spoke and they wrote the article at the same time - posting the article immediately to be ahead of everyone else.
When you are programming or writing configuration files, vi(m) is *much* faster - and when you are used to it, easier to do those things that programmers and admin need to do.
PICO is not a satisfactory solution in these situations.
Remapping the vi mode commands would work fine though (although those semantic mappings like 'r' are lost, an experienced user doesn't need them).
And how will virus researchers identify techniques to look for with their scanning software if they can't write viruii to test their ideas in a sandbox?
It's as bad as the suggestion to outlaw using software in a manner for which it was not intended, which stops administrators from securing their systems from criminals.
You can have more that one connection between computers you know. CORBA is an object model - it is excellent for organising and setting up and occasional operations using standard widgets in the server.
I would be suprised if a low-overhead, optionally compressed stream protocol for low-level drawing primitives *didn't* turn up soon. CORBA objects can negotiate the connection at startup and you get a low-overhead communication between points. This pretty much *guarantees* network performance better than X after only a little maturing time (except at startup which is only done once for each client:).
LibGGI is a userspace library, fbcon is a kernel level text console that displays on a framebuffer from an fbdev driver. They have entirely different scope.
fbdev is a very basic graphics subsystem that is not very good ATM - James Simmons (who you can contact on the fbdev mailing list) is improving it to near the level of capability of KGI - then it still won't supercede KGI but will be a partner to KGI for the people who choose to use it.
Hopefully James will choose to merge vgacon in by simply making a vga-text16 fbdev driver which is treated specially so that X servers and DRI continue to work, while reducing the code needed to support all uses. This gives the simple vga text console that the die hards want, and allows everyone else to have their hardware handled properly for games. This has the benefits of being more maintainable, and stabler for the gamers.
This is getting offtopic now so I'll stop before it gets moderated down.
Also, when you do need low-level primitives, you can simply define a class that negotiates a connection with another one in the server and uses it's own protocol. Do this negotiation early and you've got a system that is guaranteed to have a possible latency that is *at*least* as low as X's in any given situation.
I am also concerned about how applicable it is to embedded uses - though the required core seems to be very small and fast - put a simple blitter object in the server and there's your embedded desktop. I don't think X can beat that, you have to put almost all X functionality in the server (If you don't, it's not X and you can't start comparing X to Berlin), which you don't have to do with Berlin. I'm not an expert on embedded systems though.
Berlin is built on OpenGL (currently via the GGIMesa target of Mesa), using LibGGI to receive input. This gives an extremely flexible and fast (Yes, OpenGL is plenty fast if you're only using the 2D parts) UI system.
The component model uses CORBA, and the whole thing is written in standard C++. This all means that it will run on any system that has a good C++ compiler, a CORBA ORB (eg omniORB), and OpenGL libraries. You just need to write a bit of code to get input (which libGGI can be ported to provide).
This means when it is finished, it will run on just about any unix (and this is only their implementation - you could write your own to provide the interface they come up with), and many other OSs.
Only with static linking. With dynamic linking, the person distributing the software that uses the library does not copy the library, so is not restricted by copyright law. The only stuff copied is some metadata about the library and it's symbols - this is certainly fair use.
Static linking is another thing. Even copying (quoting) might be considered to be not fair use. In a document, quoting provides information which your document already alludes to (or is commentatry). How this applies to static linking is far from obvious - the law does not intend to cover this, there can be no serious contender for precedent unless the law explicitely identifies and categorises software. This is a very contentious issue and I'm just slapping some crap together here, please don't flame me.
Oh yeah, I'm no lawyer.
Copyright 1999 Tristan Wibberley All rights reserved.
>Mete out punishment proportional to the crime - not what's "best for the state".
I think better would be to take action appropriate to the person who committed the crime. Punishment and revenge (the usual examples of *justice*) are futile. The goal should be solely to reduce crime and compensate victims for their losses (and revenge doesn't count - imprisoning or killing a person in order to avenge a crime should be illegal).
If the action taken in this case was the minimum needed to prevent this person from commiting a crime, then it is fine by me - otherwise not.
The idea that excessive punishment of someone is okay because it reduce crime in the long run is insane. That guy who swore in reply to someones comment should receive a criminal record for that comment - the swearing in a public forum thing is illegal in most states in the US and also in the UK and probably others, he should be made an example of.
You get to look at a still picture for ages and examine all the detail. A frame in a 60 fps video is gone in 1/60th of a second, you don't need anywhere near 80 million polygons per frame.
*After* a new shot has started, where you have objects which have been in view for a while (half a second) you need to be up to nearer the full 80 million polygons per frame. When a complex object is new in the scene, you need far fewer polygons for it, so you can average out the rendering.
I would *guestimate* that depending on the sequence, you'll only need to render about 2 trillion polygons per frame. Still big, but much more acheivable, of course some scenes will need hardware capable of near the full 4.8 trilion.
A good mpeg encoder will make use of this to reduce the size of an I-frame and the next couple of frames - adding detail in a few select places as the eye needs it.
uhm... yeah, but which one will I have Linux running on with compilers and doing my work on for non PS2 people and be able to upgrade without invalidating the warrantee - *and* be able to play games on.
You don't have to be faster than light. Lets say you are sending a message to mars when it is just coming into view on the other side of the sun. You start sending your message at the speed of light (a radio signal), and you must finish within 20 minutes (the time it takes for the start to reach the destination at light speed).
This won't help against someone as sophisticated as that. They already used a kernel module to prevent tripwire from showing the trojans. You can put a kernel module into a kernel to make it ignore the immutable flag for the duration of your attack.
The only way to protect yourself against someone like this (apart from having no bugs in any of the software you run), is to have your disks shared with another (separated and highly secured) computer - preferable with only console access. Even then, a memory resident trojan can get you - does anyone know of any systems which have the system memory readable by another computer (without the intervention of the first CPU or any programmable hardware which can disable the feature). We are really getting into national security stuff here I think - in wich case the computer should be in a bunker with an army squadron to protect it;)
--
Re:If GPL shouldn't MS also open their client?
on
AOL Jilts Open Source
·
· Score: 1
The abstract notion of "Specification of a Thing" *cannot* have copyright because it would be like copyrighting the idea of how to fly a plane - anyone can do it if they find out the interactions with the plane that they must perform.
Here though, there is potential for patent problems (AFAIK the IM protocol has no patent pending and has been published, so there can be no contention here - it's also not non-obvious to an expert in the field of interactive textual communications). It would be difficult to patent a communications protocol under any circumstances anyway. Any protocol for a new niche would be an obvious amalgum of prior art.
Why could there be patent issues with a comms specification? Because it is a part of a "Method to do such and such, with such and such". But this (as I said above) would not be easy to weasle, and would not stand up in court (but IANAL).
I saw something on TV recently (can't remember where), using an organic compound in a cuboid shape, and when you shine light of a particular wavelength and strength it's inter molecular bonding breaks. Apply an electric field and you rotate the molecule. I saw footage of an (approx.) 1cm X 1cm x 3cm cuboid attached to a PC expansion card.
Using 2 low-power lasers they can choose a cluster of molucules.
However, I'm not certain of the reliability of the report (I don't remember which TV station).
You don't want an Xlib wrapper. You want to just have an X server that runs on your chosen GUI. For example: Solstice - this is an X server for windows, and you have the standard xlib on your client machine.
X's worst problem (IMHO) is that it's not modular enough. It specifies things to be integrated where there is no longer a performance issue. This is ugly and causes problems for thinking about your software (if you need to hit the low level interface).
All the comments about what language xfree86 is written in has nothing to do with X. X is specified to have a C library to interface with it, and has other methods too - and that does not stop a particular X server having an OO implementation, nor an OO interface.
2001 general election. This is about the UK, not England - England doesn't have it's own parliament or assembly yet remember? We still get issues voted on by Scot/Wales MPs even when they're England-only issues.
Do you think, that if SMTP had support for a SPAM mode, governments would pass laws allowing sending and propagating of unsolicited commericial email using that feature, but banning not using that feature.
So anyone sending SPAM must say so early in the STMP transaction (ie, HELO blah\n SPAM\n), so the reciever can say bye-bye if it doesn't want it, and accept it if it does. This allows for choice, which is good.
You don't even get to catch the bogeyman because the bogeyman will cover his tracks (it can be done).
Thus, the police only get to monitor legal activities, and small time criminals who don't know what they're doing.
And you do have plenty to hide. The fact that your mother has piles, your credit card details, your little brother Billy's problems with women. I don't see why we should tell our governments these things while the criminals still get to hide their activities.
Most sysadmins I know keep a pretty close eye on what goes in and out of systems that they operate. How would you be able to tell if it was the facist^H^H^H^H^H^H"internet" police "legitimately" grabbing something, and not somebody comprimising your system?
The only way to stop them is to force closed systems which don't tell the operator about connections from the police (or anyone spoofing the police).
This means banning any free UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems. This imposes a huge cost burden on new ISPs, which keeps them out of the market, and keeps the ISPs to a minimum. This is even more useful for a government who want's to control the internet.
We need a National Internet Service Providers Union. If all the major ISPs threatened to halt their services, the governments alledged policy (ie, spin) of making the UK the best place for e-commerce would be ruined (because no-one would be able to use the internet here:).
Slashdot Mirror
> Say electrons move at 10^5 m/s (somebody help me out here)
Electrons in silicon and metal circuits only move at a few mm/s but the change in electrical potential moves along very rapidly (like waves in water).
A transistor in a microchip will switch when the fast moving wave moves a few extra electons into the semiconductor junction changing it's electrical properties.
With light, each photon will be a part of the signal itself, so you need to find a crystal which needs a certain number of photons entering on one axis in a given time to prevent photons from passing through another axis (or some similar mechanism). This should present no heat problem if excess photons simply pass through unimpeded - so you have a sort of photonic capacitance, a light equivalent to the FET.
Of course things are really much more complicated.
--
It's not *too* bad, certainly not babelfish quality:
s/follows/followers/
s/the L/L/
s/ perhaps/, perhaps,/
s/of/off
But you're right. It's not good enough for a real news article. Perhaps they could be let off because it looks like Alan Cox spoke and they wrote the article at the same time - posting the article immediately to be ahead of everyone else.
--
This is offtopic, but...
When you are programming or writing configuration files, vi(m) is *much* faster - and when you are used to it, easier to do those things that programmers and admin need to do.
PICO is not a satisfactory solution in these situations.
Remapping the vi mode commands would work fine though (although those semantic mappings like 'r' are lost, an experienced user doesn't need them).
--
And how will virus researchers identify techniques to look for with their scanning software if they can't write viruii to test their ideas in a sandbox?
It's as bad as the suggestion to outlaw using software in a manner for which it was not intended, which stops administrators from securing their systems from criminals.
This is very poorly thought out.
--
You can have more that one connection between computers you know. CORBA is an object model - it is excellent for organising and setting up and occasional operations using standard widgets in the server.
:).
I would be suprised if a low-overhead, optionally compressed stream protocol for low-level drawing primitives *didn't* turn up soon. CORBA objects can negotiate the connection at startup and you get a low-overhead communication between points. This pretty much *guarantees* network performance better than X after only a little maturing time (except at startup which is only done once for each client
--
LibGGI is a userspace library, fbcon is a kernel level text console that displays on a framebuffer from an fbdev driver. They have entirely different scope.
fbdev is a very basic graphics subsystem that is not very good ATM - James Simmons (who you can contact on the fbdev mailing list) is improving it to near the level of capability of KGI - then it still won't supercede KGI but will be a partner to KGI for the people who choose to use it.
Hopefully James will choose to merge vgacon in by simply making a vga-text16 fbdev driver which is treated specially so that X servers and DRI continue to work, while reducing the code needed to support all uses. This gives the simple vga text console that the die hards want, and allows everyone else to have their hardware handled properly for games. This has the benefits of being more maintainable, and stabler for the gamers.
This is getting offtopic now so I'll stop before it gets moderated down.
--
Also, when you do need low-level primitives, you can simply define a class that negotiates a connection with another one in the server and uses it's own protocol. Do this negotiation early and you've got a system that is guaranteed to have a possible latency that is *at*least* as low as X's in any given situation.
I am also concerned about how applicable it is to embedded uses - though the required core seems to be very small and fast - put a simple blitter object in the server and there's your embedded desktop. I don't think X can beat that, you have to put almost all X functionality in the server (If you don't, it's not X and you can't start comparing X to Berlin), which you don't have to do with Berlin. I'm not an expert on embedded systems though.
--
The answer is in the interview.
Berlin is built on OpenGL (currently via the GGIMesa target of Mesa), using LibGGI to receive input. This gives an extremely flexible and fast (Yes, OpenGL is plenty fast if you're only using the 2D parts) UI system.
The component model uses CORBA, and the whole thing is written in standard C++. This all means that it will run on any system that has a good C++ compiler, a CORBA ORB (eg omniORB), and OpenGL libraries. You just need to write a bit of code to get input (which libGGI can be ported to provide).
This means when it is finished, it will run on just about any unix (and this is only their implementation - you could write your own to provide the interface they come up with), and many other OSs.
--
Only with static linking. With dynamic linking, the person distributing the software that uses the library does not copy the library, so is not restricted by copyright law. The only stuff copied is some metadata about the library and it's symbols - this is certainly fair use.
Static linking is another thing. Even copying (quoting) might be considered to be not fair use. In a document, quoting provides information which your document already alludes to (or is commentatry). How this applies to static linking is far from obvious - the law does not intend to cover this, there can be no serious contender for precedent unless the law explicitely identifies and categorises software. This is a very contentious issue and I'm just slapping some crap together here, please don't flame me.
Oh yeah, I'm no lawyer.
Copyright 1999 Tristan Wibberley
All rights reserved.
--
phone company == penny pinching == interns ;)
Yes, even interns can admin Linux boxes - it's that easy.
--
>Mete out punishment proportional to the crime - not what's "best for the state".
I think better would be to take action appropriate to the person who committed the crime. Punishment and revenge (the usual examples of *justice*) are futile. The goal should be solely to reduce crime and compensate victims for their losses (and revenge doesn't count - imprisoning or killing a person in order to avenge a crime should be illegal).
If the action taken in this case was the minimum needed to prevent this person from commiting a crime, then it is fine by me - otherwise not.
The idea that excessive punishment of someone is okay because it reduce crime in the long run is insane. That guy who swore in reply to someones comment should receive a criminal record for that comment - the swearing in a public forum thing is illegal in most states in the US and also in the UK and probably others, he should be made an example of.
--
LOL!!!
Brilliant. Someone moderate this *way* up!
--
AFAIK not quite that much.
You get to look at a still picture for ages and examine all the detail. A frame in a 60 fps video is gone in 1/60th of a second, you don't need anywhere near 80 million polygons per frame.
*After* a new shot has started, where you have objects which have been in view for a while (half a second) you need to be up to nearer the full 80 million polygons per frame. When a complex object is new in the scene, you need far fewer polygons for it, so you can average out the rendering.
I would *guestimate* that depending on the sequence, you'll only need to render about 2 trillion polygons per frame. Still big, but much more acheivable, of course some scenes will need hardware capable of near the full 4.8 trilion.
A good mpeg encoder will make use of this to reduce the size of an I-frame and the next couple of frames - adding detail in a few select places as the eye needs it.
--
uhm... yeah, but which one will I have Linux running on with compilers and doing my work on for non PS2 people and be able to upgrade without invalidating the warrantee - *and* be able to play games on.
--
You don't have to be faster than light. Lets say you are sending a message to mars when it is just coming into view on the other side of the sun. You start sending your message at the speed of light (a radio signal), and you must finish within 20 minutes (the time it takes for the start to reach the destination at light speed).
--
This won't help against someone as sophisticated as that. They already used a kernel module to prevent tripwire from showing the trojans. You can put a kernel module into a kernel to make it ignore the immutable flag for the duration of your attack.
;)
The only way to protect yourself against someone like this (apart from having no bugs in any of the software you run), is to have your disks shared with another (separated and highly secured) computer - preferable with only console access. Even then, a memory resident trojan can get you - does anyone know of any systems which have the system memory readable by another computer (without the intervention of the first CPU or any programmable hardware which can disable the feature). We are really getting into national security stuff here I think - in wich case the computer should be in a bunker with an army squadron to protect it
--
The abstract notion of "Specification of a Thing" *cannot* have copyright because it would be like copyrighting the idea of how to fly a plane - anyone can do it if they find out the interactions with the plane that they must perform.
Here though, there is potential for patent problems (AFAIK the IM protocol has no patent pending and has been published, so there can be no contention here - it's also not non-obvious to an expert in the field of interactive textual communications). It would be difficult to patent a communications protocol under any circumstances anyway. Any protocol for a new niche would be an obvious amalgum of prior art.
Why could there be patent issues with a comms specification? Because it is a part of a "Method to do such and such, with such and such". But this (as I said above) would not be easy to weasle, and would not stand up in court (but IANAL).
--
I saw something on TV recently (can't remember where), using an organic compound in a cuboid shape, and when you shine light of a particular wavelength and strength it's inter molecular bonding breaks. Apply an electric field and you rotate the molecule. I saw footage of an (approx.) 1cm X 1cm x 3cm cuboid attached to a PC expansion card.
Using 2 low-power lasers they can choose a cluster of molucules.
However, I'm not certain of the reliability of the report (I don't remember which TV station).
--
> There are other arguments, of course, and the US has an awful lot of laws...
And it looks like it will have a lot of awful laws.
--
You don't want an Xlib wrapper. You want to just have an X server that runs on your chosen GUI. For example: Solstice - this is an X server for windows, and you have the standard xlib on your client machine.
X's worst problem (IMHO) is that it's not modular enough. It specifies things to be integrated where there is no longer a performance issue. This is ugly and causes problems for thinking about your software (if you need to hit the low level interface).
All the comments about what language xfree86 is written in has nothing to do with X. X is specified to have a C library to interface with it, and has other methods too - and that does not stop a particular X server having an OO implementation, nor an OO interface.
--
2001 general election. This is about the UK, not England - England doesn't have it's own parliament or assembly yet remember? We still get issues voted on by Scot/Wales MPs even when they're England-only issues.
Do you think, that if SMTP had support for a SPAM mode, governments would pass laws allowing sending and propagating of unsolicited commericial email using that feature, but banning not using that feature.
So anyone sending SPAM must say so early in the STMP transaction (ie, HELO blah\n SPAM\n), so the reciever can say bye-bye if it doesn't want it, and accept it if it does. This allows for choice, which is good.
You don't even get to catch the bogeyman because the bogeyman will cover his tracks (it can be done).
Thus, the police only get to monitor legal activities, and small time criminals who don't know what they're doing.
And you do have plenty to hide. The fact that your mother has piles, your credit card details, your little brother Billy's problems with women. I don't see why we should tell our governments these things while the criminals still get to hide their activities.
How about "Considering retirement" :)