The biggest problem is that most errors can't really be handled. If your pointer comes back NULL, it is likely a problem outside of your control. For example, if it is because there is no memory, you can simply let it SIGSEGV, or try to put up a message - but if the library needs to do a malloc, it would likely fail within the library so you would get some other bad result.
Or for example, a file open that fails. Maybe you don't have permission, or maybe it doesn't exist. Or maybe it is locked by someone else. Or maybe the filesystem is hosed. Most of these are unlikely events. You get instant bloatware if you now have the 1000 detailed messages explaining exactly why the file couldn't be opened. But does this improve the user experience? Maybe the most common are good (e.g. displaying the path might make a misspelled file or wrong path obvious).
Others have pointed out the deficiencies of other OS error handling (BSOD, unhandled exception boxes, etc.), but even WHEN IT IS HANDLED, it often means the program must be aborted - it just sits there waiting for you to click OK. I find this even more irritating since I have to spend extra time fidgeting with a dialog box instead of restarting the app.
Mary Celeste and the Marie Celeste (fiction)...
on
Locating The Mary Celeste
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, The, ISBN 0-06-012475-X
Kusche, Lawrence David.
P. 31:
Chapter 5, December 1872 Mary Celeste.
...
So many stories have been told about the famous derelict in the century since it was fond that it is almost impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction.
P. 35.
Fiction writers have made good use of the incident, beginning wiht a young, unknown author named Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote what was a the time an anonymous article in the January 1884 issue of The Cornhill Magazine... he named his fictional ship the "Marie Celeste"...
Go back and check. The "scientific consensus" back then was that the smoke and smog was cooling the earth and the temprature would be dropping and we would have glaciers in Nebraska.
This consensus had only one thing in common with the current global warming (and the CFCs - of course Mt. Pinatubo spewing more chlorine than has every been used in CFCs directly into the stratosphere couldn't have any effect on the ozone layer...).
Basically, Man is killing the earth, ecosphere, atmosphere, oceans, etc. and that we must kill off 95% of the people on earth (or contracept them) and return to a dark ages lifestyle.
The worshippers of Gaia want to sacrifice others on an even wider scale than even the Aztecs, and perhaps even more painfully
I've connected their Palm V modem to my Laptop running both MacOS and Linux. They also have a PCMCIA version (the Merlin - some CompUSAs have it as well as direct). Basically it connects to any serial port and does PPP (and a few other things, check out the novatelwireless site).
Re:Poll: Ask their ISP to shut down them as a WARE
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Sony Violating GPL?
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· Score: 1
If I posted sony copyrighted materials, they would do this to me.
Seriously, we should wait for a response - many people don't understand the GPL. And be polite.
Never attribute to malice that which is explained by stupidity or ignorance.
If I read the response right, he can't even comment on whether the school does or does not have a policy banning, discouraging, tolerating or encouraging bullying and harrassment of other students.
Normaly they have multivolume tomes of rules, regulations, and policies, however if they weren't enforcing an anti-harrassment policy and they have one, they might be in trouble.
Fine, they cannot comment on the specific case, but are they totally deaf, dumb, and blind to the bullying and harrassment so a thousand acts of those kind are ignored and one sarcastic response gets you expelled?
You might want to add WMA file format. (How many reasons not to use XP - we already have the registration, the other protocol perversions...)
Apple has been touting iTunes for MP3, and the capability to rip and move music to your portable player, etc.
for WMA to succeed, M$ will need to do an OSX port. OSX is based on Darwin which is OpenSource, and so will NEVER have a secure sound path. So as soon as there is a AIFF-file-output "sound" driver, people will be buying Macs to use iTunes and such.
Then there is VMWare with/dev/dsp redirected to a file (it takes a bit more, but netaudio shows the path). Or the various Linux binaries using Wine libraries to grab Window's codecs. To secure the path they have to secure every program and DLL and not allow any virtualized environment. They already have trouble keeping their DLLs straight.
Or are they going to demand EVERY pc user upgrade their already CD quality soundcard, or will it refuse to playback through a speaker device without doing the underwater phonebooth thing?
I think that Apple, and ultimately the OS community will be the big beneficiaries.
I give it about a year. 6 months if there are a few geeks on a mission.
Basically it would take binfmt_macho to be written, maybe an extended hfs (if we don't have an osxvfsshim module). And the syscall translation shim.
And how long until it goes the other way? Add elf support (plus elf shared libs) and the linux syscall shim to Darwin? Maybe the same time.
At some point they will cross and then Darwin will be subjected to natural seleciton.
I already can run the Gimp on OS X.
It is a bit silly to have a modular kernel and then always have to include the same modules. Meanwhile monolithic linux has modules that install devices, filesystems, almost everything (Until I had some hiccups with late 2.3, my kernel had a ramdisk and cramfs, and loaded the rest, I really should revisit that).
At some point, probably 2-3 years, Darwin and Linux will either merge or become so cross compatible that one might all but disappear.
The Euro is 15% backed by gold. Usually it eventually inflates to that point, then they abandon even that peg.
It happened in the '70s when Nixon had to break the peg because the market price was above the $35/oz official price because we were inflating.
Gold can't easily be inflated (given the mine supply and jewelry demand), doesn't rust or otherwise decay, but doesn't pay interest. It is a store of value and medium of exchange.
That is why it works as money and probably will after the fiat currencies blow up. Check the inflation rate in Brazil or Turkey recently?
As long as you are going to set up an e-currency infrastructure, you either need to be the government to declare the bits to have value, or have the bits as a claim on something that does.
It was a service provider that would exchange credit card transactions into/out of the e-gold system. e-gold stores gold, silver, etc. and lets you receive or spend it digitially and in fractional units.
There was apparently a high instance of credit card fraud (so when are they going to raid western union?), but they took the computer, made no arrests, and apparently tried to get the owners of the exchange to implicate e-gold.
So goes the corporate cycle. Innovation first, then when that becomes too difficult, marketing sells junk for a while, then you finally use lawyers to force people to pay up as long as you can.
RamBus is actually quite innovative. They started in the last phase of the corporate cycle.
Microfiche is a complete image of the original, as would scanned in (or even PDFs) of the original newspaper with everything in context.
Of course it depends on the contract, but were they paid for the article's original publication, or did they transfer ALL rights?
When you extract, collect, or otherwise create a different publication, it becomes a second discrete work. Sometimes collections of articles are published in books.
If you don't restrict anything, the newspaper can print a collection of a single author as a book and publish that without any further compensation, although it no longer has anything to do with a newspaper.
Again, it depends on the contract. Did they lease the article for that one contextual purpose, or did they buy all rights to any distribution?
And the question is probably if the contract doesn't say one way or the other, which way should the law assume it should be.
While schools tell the students to be good little children, actual assaults by bullies go unpunished, as well as harrassment that would be prosecuted in our politically correct world. But the victims are the ones that get in trouble when they do anything - if they speak out they are the bad ones for threatening (apparently instead of actually committing acts of violence that they are more often the victim of). If they don't, they are in trouble for not reporting or being to passive. If they do report, nothing happens.
All they or anyone wants is to be treated equally. And it seems that only Sam Colt made it possible for people to be equal.
For those who think it excessive, how else is someone who weighs 150 lbs (and may be of the gender without upper body strength) going to defend themselves against a 250 Lb football player whose father can afford tae quan do lessons for him? Dial 911? Oh, I forgot, they've banned cell phones in school too.
Schools used to be a lot less tolerant of individuality (at least outwardly expressed), but they were safer too. When you tolerate too much, aggression tends to win by natural selection over passivity. If we want schools to be havens where children learn, we should have uniform rules and enforce them. It might be less "fun", but bullying and depression and suicide would go away, and the purpose of schools is learning, not "fun".
And let me also place blame where it belongs. Many children are just another "thing" in their parent's portfolio. The vacation, the SUV, the baby, the sunroom, all wanted and planned for. This generation of children have become just another material item, and they realize it. Today's parents pay in guilt by voting for restrictions, and buying the best daycare, tutors, psychologists, ritalin, but don't give of their selves or time. They have a 30 minute quality-timer.
I was blessed with a mommy and daddy. People that I could not find a moment or any evidence that anything else was more important when I was growing up.
This generation isn't lost. Or even misplaced. Except in the sense that their souls are merely 30 minute entries in their custodial parent's daytimer, and the two day weekends when they visit their other parent. They know exactly how important they are. The wonder is that there are so FEW suicides. Don't we return or otherwise dispose of defective products?
No one should look to government - especially the schools - to even try to fix this. They can't grow a soul.
Children with character, and who have been instilled with honor and integrity don't depend on peer acceptance, nor does the physical pain of bullying bleed through to cause emotional pain. If they know they are precious, external events won't change that. If they aren't taught values, they will drift until they eventually crash.
There are other cites (a site that incites) that are against doing anything with animals that involves removing them from nature, not to smoke (if you want to talk about harassment), not to drink (with or without driving).
You can personally feel that speech you disagree with is "yelling fire", but it isn't so, at least not legally which the actual text of the decision (which appeals to reason and not to emotion) covers in depth.
By the way, racism and tobacco are legal. Are sites suggesting that you should boycott tobacco by threating you with disease and racists to bew banned? (The cigarette analogy was from the decision as was one case cited by the court involved exactly this - the NAACP was doing a boycott and one of their members made a much more direct threat against those breaking the boycott - this was considered protected speech).
The moment the standard becomes anything less than a direct threat, we will have a speech guestapo worse than anything you can imagine.
And don't assume that the liberals and pro-abortion side will always be in power. The first ammendment is designed to transcend such times.
Otherwise after the political wind shifts, or even the regulatory structure, a site that explains how to do an abortion might be banned because it encourages practicing medicine without a license, or because it incites people to murder (after abortion becomes illegal again).
If this were 1971 (pre roe-v-wade) would you ban such pro-abortion sites? That is exactly the danger. When your speech would have been the "guestapo tactics".
Some would only learn the value of the broad first ammendment the hard way. When we have the reverse of the status quo that happens to be in their favor at the moment.
Actually this is probably the reason I didn't renew my Libertarian party membership.
Thought crimes.
Web censorship.
Excessive fines (8th ammendment issue).
Who cares? Not the LP. They go into a tizzy at even the mildest attempt to prevent children from being used for pornography on the internet and say write half the western hemisphere in protest.
This REAL case treading on all the same points that the Computer Decency Act and others with actual defendants found guilty didn't elecit even a peep.
Probably because they didn't like the speech that was being banned.
But the true test of (small-l) libertarian principles is to defend things you disagree with.
Credit card numbers aren't normally part of any public record.
Your (residential) address usually is because you have to give that out to get a driver's license, and by extension the phone book that links the information makes that public info.
If your state happens to put identifiers up on the internet (sometimes for a fee - there are ads for publicdata.com or somesuch that play occasionally), you should move or not give out that information. Or get a private mailbox or PO box and voicemail number.
If I give out information, I cannot then claim it is private unless I as for nondisclosure in advance. Maybe that shouldn't be the state of things, and I would approve of any law designed to fix the situation.
Also, the plaintiffs in question were licensed professionals. Unless you want to argue against licensing (medicine or driving for that matter), which is one possibility, the information used to identify the license holder should be on the public record.
And what if they just linked to 411.com(?) or whatever other service would produce the exact same invasive data (consider 2600-DeCSS)?
I suspect the plaintiffs did little if anything to protect the information they were bothered about appearing on the defendant's site. Even if they did, once discovered (again like DeCSS), can they protect it? Where is the IP right in your address and phone number?
He asks how to add a hard drive. Well, with an iMac you can't, so don't bother asking. Actually you can if you don't want any CDROM type device and shave a cable. Easy for the common man? The iBook hard drive is even harder.
And I CAN repartition my Linux ext2 drive without reformatting. (Windows still has problems with things having to be on C:, D:, or whereever the drive was enumerated when you installed the item). How do I repartition my iMac or iBook?
What about my SCSI tape drive? out of luck there. The FW/SCSI converters aren't stable (don't exist for OSX) and I can't add interfaces to most of the latest apple hardware.
Well, what about printouts? Most of the web pages I try printing (with 3 different browsers) still occasionally overlap images obscuring text. OSX gives me 1" margins and I haven't found anywhere to tell it I'm not going to create a matte portrait, but I would like to read with normal sized text and kill fewer trees.
Many printers don't have Mac drivers, and OSX hasn't included ghostscript, which linux does.
The problem with OSX is the same as with most of the "easy to use" interfaces. When they are good, they are very good, but when they are bad they are horrid. As long as I stay "in the box", and use newer mac approved hardware (oh, Linux runs on old 68k Macs and all the old powermacs - does OSX?), everything works beautifully. When I try to think different, it becomes impossible.
Linux has a steep learning curve, but once you've surmounted it, it is much like breaking the sound barrier. Things tend to go smoothly. The worst or hardest problems (if not proprietary hardware that you can't get info or help) are not that much more difficult than the simple things. Everything is so modular you can find the point of failure and fix it, or add the missing piece.
The final problem is the semantic confusion. OSX is Darwin (their mutant BSDerivative), plus Quartz plus apps plus other things. GNU/Linux is similarly the Linux kernel, lots of GNU tools, lots of other contributed things, and various apps. The integrated package OSX is more friendly than the integrated GNU/Linux is currently. But GNU/Linux is still growing.
If Apple really wanted to, they could have built OSX on Linux (and would have more filesystems - sometimes adding a disk means adding an existing disk with data).
For what its worth, I think Linux/PPC and Darwin, and by extension OSX will converge if not merge in 2-3 years. Add elf binary support and a few other shims to Darwin and you can run LinuxPPC binaries. Add a compatability layer to LinuxPPC and OSX would think its Darwin.
The biggest thing keeping them apart are the incompatible licenses. The second thing is the mutations to the gcc toolchain and the different IO, VFS, and such interfaces. They may or may not be better, but I can't easily redo a Linux driver or filesystem into Darwin even without worrying about GPL v.s. APSL. But I think these things will eventually happen.
I can't apply just the parts of the service packs that fix the holes. I also have to apply the parts that break the applications and/or drivers.
This is a design issue. I've often debugged Linux kernel modules inserting and removing them on a running system without affecting anything else.
It is extremely rare for a fix in one place on an non-microsoft system to have any effect (much less a disabling effect) on unrelated programs.
The incremental patch paradigm works better for mission critical systems, but Microsoft doesn't have that, just service packs and hotfixes.
They are running SP3 because applying anything later will render their system DEAD. If you can't run the application there is no point in having a secured system.
Why should they have to fix their software if they coded to Microsoft APIs using a Microsoft enviroment?
And I do blame the companies. If they hired the right people (or let them do things right) they wouldn't pick an OS where they have monolithic service packs. Their mistake was starting with Microsoft without allowing for recoding for every service pack.
1. Most things port to Darwin (the BSD layer), but there are a few complications. One linux complication is that gcc sometimes does bad things when pressed to optimize. But I've played DVDs under Linux/PPC.
2. Many AC3 ports don't resample - most Mac hardware has 44.1Khz as the highest sampling rate, not the 48KHz DVDs use, so someone needs to add a decimator. Once that is done, you can get sound.
3. Apple didn't provide a BSD layer to the DVD, so you need to use IOKit to do the key exchange with the DVD player using a completely different set of calls. They are in the header, but switching over the ioctls isn't trivial. This is if you want to use X or XAqua.
4. Then you need to use the graphics calls. Since X already uses them there should be an easy access to the framebuffer.
I would love an Opensource DVD player to beat an official Apple player to OS X.
Just don't expect anyone else to be able to read your documents. Office 97 when it first came out couldn't write Office 95 files, and O95 couldn't read O97, so you had to upgrade your entire office. Assuming the internet will reach into places like Africa, how do I send them a document when they will have to subscribe to read?
And will I be able to use it at my local library?
Also, trading a $350 one time cost for a $400/year bill eats into cash flow assuming current interest rates. You can get a loan or spread out a payment on your credit card if you have a cost v.s. cash flow problems. Maybe the dot-coms are bombing because the people running them don't understand basic economics and accounting.
And you will have reduced productivity because of the gratuitous changes in the upgrades and file format conversion time and whatever and you will have NO CONTROL over doing this.
so those with 56K modems will be forced to upgrade. I've seen a lot of the junk that comes down for the "newer" browsers and when it is not outright annoying, it merely wastes bandwidth.
I'm still waiting for the "Run Javascript" button so I don't get the annoying pop-ups (I leave it disabled because of this).
I also usually print out material. The web is designed to kill trees since most pages end up being narrow content surrounded by junk. A few sites have printer friendly versions.
Sometimes I run in emulation in 640x480. Many sites seem to have been designed for 1920x1440 full screen windows.
Who is pushing the move to sites that require a personal T1 to access in a reasonable amount of time, that require 25".26 dot pitch monitors, Whatever IE Beta is out there with all the Windows plugins that don't work on Mac and Linux, and that then pop up a dozen ads?
Lynx works. It even accesses frames individually, a trick that the versions of IE I have don't (I can disable them, but not do "frames as links").
It's about content. All this stuff is just noise. It might be pretty noise, but it is still mostly noise.
Re:DVD Decryption - A technical reason it's not
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Play DVDs On Linux
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· Score: 1
I'll leave the legal issues out for now
The problem is that only some of the sectors are encrypted, and you have to parse the IFO files. And I don't know if a multiple title DVD would have multiple keys and create a management issue.
Theoretically you could do it (probably as a patch to udffs, not the DVD layer), but you would have to determine what sectors were encrypted and which were not, and do the DVD ioctls to do the key handshake before you could access those sectors, then you would have to decrypt just those sectors and not the plaintext sectors.
In sum, you couldn't just do a loopback device css decryption (which might require doing the 2048 bytes sectors).
It also doesn't buy you much if you don't fix the bits that says the disk is encrypted to prevent double-decryption.
Since the DVD player needs to decode the IFO files anyway (which is why The Matrix doesn't work just sending the VOB to the decoder), you get the crypt/noncrypt info "for free".
Any DVD is mountable as udf and all I've seen as iso9660, so that isn't an issue.
And once the DVD has done the key exchange with the drive (css-auth), all sectors are available, but some are encrypted.
If someone knows of an easy way to figure out which title keys apply to which encrypted sectors without going through the effort of parsing everything it would be much easier.
At least not for a long while. First, you really need OS X (and probably a paid Apple Developer) to do things like sound and other hardware functions since Apple is delaying opensourcing those layers.
For example, there is no way of getting sound under just Darwin unless you write your own driver, which is going to be superceeded by the official Apple driver.
The Man pages are wrong under Darwin - describing hardware and devices that don't exist, things that are overridden and disabled (netinfo/lookupd acts like NIS), and the paths for data are wrong (lookupd's manpage points to nonexistent paths).
Within those limits, Darwin works very well and has some interesting IO and VFS concepts. I won't say better until I see them developed for. Apple has also done a lot of work on things like GCC, so many things "under the hood" work better under Darwin than LinuxPPC.
Right now, I can get sound and even some multimedia (I've played mpeg movies) under LinuxPPC. I can't under Darwin. Under darwin, lots of things barely work, and those that do are limited in features. Under Linux, the framebuffer console is fast and I can easily change modes and fonts under Linux.
Basically LinuxPPC is usable as an environment - I've actually got most things I do under x86 working under it. A few others are compiler or endian hiccups I can usually resolve
Darwin is almost useless as an environment, except to develop Darwin in situ. But it was intended as a server, which might be the problem. They don't want it to be too "cool". A full Darwin (with X windows, sound, multimedia, just like LinuxPPC) system won't be a threat to OS X, but I don't think Darwin will spark a lot of of creative Opensource development until it is as good as LinuxPPC without Quartz and the rest of OS X.
Right now, if you want to run a rich UNIX style environment on your Mac, LinuxPPC is the only viable alternative. For development, Darwin and it's toolchain is more Mac friendly. They both have their advantages.
And actually I see any rivalry as friendly. Darwin and Linux can learn a lot from each other, and I would rather have several good alternatives.
There have been reasons in the past Linus has rejected patches and created a small fork.
This is a problem because a production (4 is an even number) kernel is badly broken and Linus isn't accepting fixes.
Though I doubt it is anything sinister. Maybe he simply can't test the patches, or can't test them easily. Could someone ask Apple to send Linus an iMac or something if that is all that is stopping it?
I have an Alpha (UDB), Dual P3, Athlon, iMacDV, 486 notebook and iBookSE, and run linux on all, except the iBook but that is because I got it last night and I need to adapt a boot kernel/disk for the vid chip - it booted but the screen blanked.
So I would really like a working 2.4 kernel for my iBook and iMac from an unforked tree.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem is that most errors can't really be handled. If your pointer comes back NULL, it is likely a problem outside of your control. For example, if it is because there is no memory, you can simply let it SIGSEGV, or try to put up a message - but if the library needs to do a malloc, it would likely fail within the library so you would get some other bad result.
Or for example, a file open that fails. Maybe you don't have permission, or maybe it doesn't exist. Or maybe it is locked by someone else. Or maybe the filesystem is hosed. Most of these are unlikely events. You get instant bloatware if you now have the 1000 detailed messages explaining exactly why the file couldn't be opened. But does this improve the user experience? Maybe the most common are good (e.g. displaying the path might make a misspelled file or wrong path obvious).
Others have pointed out the deficiencies of other OS error handling (BSOD, unhandled exception boxes, etc.), but even WHEN IT IS HANDLED, it often means the program must be aborted - it just sits there waiting for you to click OK. I find this even more irritating since I have to spend extra time fidgeting with a dialog box instead of restarting the app.
From Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, The, ISBN 0-06-012475-X
... he named his fictional ship the "Marie Celeste"...
Kusche, Lawrence David.
P. 31:
Chapter 5, December 1872 Mary Celeste.
...
So many stories have been told about the famous derelict in the century since it was fond that it is almost impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction.
P. 35.
Fiction writers have made good use of the incident, beginning wiht a young, unknown author named Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote what was a the time an anonymous article in the January 1884 issue of The Cornhill Magazine
Go back and check. The "scientific consensus" back then was that the smoke and smog was cooling the earth and the temprature would be dropping and we would have glaciers in Nebraska.
This consensus had only one thing in common with the current global warming (and the CFCs - of course Mt. Pinatubo spewing more chlorine than has every been used in CFCs directly into the stratosphere couldn't have any effect on the ozone layer...).
Basically, Man is killing the earth, ecosphere, atmosphere, oceans, etc. and that we must kill off 95% of the people on earth (or contracept them) and return to a dark ages lifestyle.
The worshippers of Gaia want to sacrifice others on an even wider scale than even the Aztecs, and perhaps even more painfully
I've connected their Palm V modem to my Laptop running both MacOS and Linux. They also have a PCMCIA version (the Merlin - some CompUSAs have it as well as direct). Basically it connects to any serial port and does PPP (and a few other things, check out the novatelwireless site).
If I posted sony copyrighted materials, they would do this to me.
Seriously, we should wait for a response - many people don't understand the GPL. And be polite.
Never attribute to malice that which is explained by stupidity or ignorance.
If I read the response right, he can't even comment on whether the school does or does not have a policy banning, discouraging, tolerating or encouraging bullying and harrassment of other students.
Normaly they have multivolume tomes of rules, regulations, and policies, however if they weren't enforcing an anti-harrassment policy and they have one, they might be in trouble.
Fine, they cannot comment on the specific case, but are they totally deaf, dumb, and blind to the bullying and harrassment so a thousand acts of those kind are ignored and one sarcastic response gets you expelled?
You might want to add WMA file format. (How many reasons not to use XP - we already have the registration, the other protocol perversions...)
/dev/dsp redirected to a file (it takes a bit more, but netaudio shows the path). Or the various Linux binaries using Wine libraries to grab Window's codecs. To secure the path they have to secure every program and DLL and not allow any virtualized environment. They already have trouble keeping their DLLs straight.
Apple has been touting iTunes for MP3, and the capability to rip and move music to your portable player, etc.
for WMA to succeed, M$ will need to do an OSX port. OSX is based on Darwin which is OpenSource, and so will NEVER have a secure sound path. So as soon as there is a AIFF-file-output "sound" driver, people will be buying Macs to use iTunes and such.
Then there is VMWare with
Or are they going to demand EVERY pc user upgrade their already CD quality soundcard, or will it refuse to playback through a speaker device without doing the underwater phonebooth thing?
I think that Apple, and ultimately the OS community will be the big beneficiaries.
I give it about a year. 6 months if there are a few geeks on a mission.
Basically it would take binfmt_macho to be written, maybe an extended hfs (if we don't have an osxvfsshim module). And the syscall translation shim.
And how long until it goes the other way? Add elf support (plus elf shared libs) and the linux syscall shim to Darwin? Maybe the same time.
At some point they will cross and then Darwin will be subjected to natural seleciton.
I already can run the Gimp on OS X.
It is a bit silly to have a modular kernel and then always have to include the same modules. Meanwhile monolithic linux has modules that install devices, filesystems, almost everything (Until I had some hiccups with late 2.3, my kernel had a ramdisk and cramfs, and loaded the rest, I really should revisit that).
At some point, probably 2-3 years, Darwin and Linux will either merge or become so cross compatible that one might all but disappear.
The Euro is 15% backed by gold. Usually it eventually inflates to that point, then they abandon even that peg.
It happened in the '70s when Nixon had to break the peg because the market price was above the $35/oz official price because we were inflating.
Gold can't easily be inflated (given the mine supply and jewelry demand), doesn't rust or otherwise decay, but doesn't pay interest. It is a store of value and medium of exchange.
That is why it works as money and probably will after the fiat currencies blow up. Check the inflation rate in Brazil or Turkey recently?
As long as you are going to set up an e-currency infrastructure, you either need to be the government to declare the bits to have value, or have the bits as a claim on something that does.
It was a service provider that would exchange credit card transactions into/out of the e-gold system. e-gold stores gold, silver, etc. and lets you receive or spend it digitially and in fractional units.
There was apparently a high instance of credit card fraud (so when are they going to raid western union?), but they took the computer, made no arrests, and apparently tried to get the owners of the exchange to implicate e-gold.
The next state is Bankruptcy.
So goes the corporate cycle. Innovation first, then when that becomes too difficult, marketing sells junk for a while, then you finally use lawyers to force people to pay up as long as you can.
RamBus is actually quite innovative. They started in the last phase of the corporate cycle.
Microsoft is there now.
If you think about collection copyrights.
Microfiche is a complete image of the original, as would scanned in (or even PDFs) of the original newspaper with everything in context.
Of course it depends on the contract, but were they paid for the article's original publication, or did they transfer ALL rights?
When you extract, collect, or otherwise create a different publication, it becomes a second discrete work. Sometimes collections of articles are published in books.
If you don't restrict anything, the newspaper can print a collection of a single author as a book and publish that without any further compensation, although it no longer has anything to do with a newspaper.
Again, it depends on the contract. Did they lease the article for that one contextual purpose, or did they buy all rights to any distribution?
And the question is probably if the contract doesn't say one way or the other, which way should the law assume it should be.
While schools tell the students to be good little children, actual assaults by bullies go unpunished, as well as harrassment that would be prosecuted in our politically correct world. But the victims are the ones that get in trouble when they do anything - if they speak out they are the bad ones for threatening (apparently instead of actually committing acts of violence that they are more often the victim of). If they don't, they are in trouble for not reporting or being to passive. If they do report, nothing happens.
All they or anyone wants is to be treated equally. And it seems that only Sam Colt made it possible for people to be equal.
For those who think it excessive, how else is someone who weighs 150 lbs (and may be of the gender without upper body strength) going to defend themselves against a 250 Lb football player whose father can afford tae quan do lessons for him? Dial 911? Oh, I forgot, they've banned cell phones in school too.
Schools used to be a lot less tolerant of individuality (at least outwardly expressed), but they were safer too. When you tolerate too much, aggression tends to win by natural selection over passivity. If we want schools to be havens where children learn, we should have uniform rules and enforce them. It might be less "fun", but bullying and depression and suicide would go away, and the purpose of schools is learning, not "fun".
And let me also place blame where it belongs. Many children are just another "thing" in their parent's portfolio. The vacation, the SUV, the baby, the sunroom, all wanted and planned for. This generation of children have become just another material item, and they realize it. Today's parents pay in guilt by voting for restrictions, and buying the best daycare, tutors, psychologists, ritalin, but don't give of their selves or time. They have a 30 minute quality-timer.
I was blessed with a mommy and daddy. People that I could not find a moment or any evidence that anything else was more important when I was growing up.
This generation isn't lost. Or even misplaced. Except in the sense that their souls are merely 30 minute entries in their custodial parent's daytimer, and the two day weekends when they visit their other parent. They know exactly how important they are. The wonder is that there are so FEW suicides. Don't we return or otherwise dispose of defective products?
No one should look to government - especially the schools - to even try to fix this. They can't grow a soul.
Children with character, and who have been instilled with honor and integrity don't depend on peer acceptance, nor does the physical pain of bullying bleed through to cause emotional pain. If they know they are precious, external events won't change that. If they aren't taught values, they will drift until they eventually crash.
There are other cites (a site that incites) that are against doing anything with animals that involves removing them from nature, not to smoke (if you want to talk about harassment), not to drink (with or without driving).
You can personally feel that speech you disagree with is "yelling fire", but it isn't so, at least not legally which the actual text of the decision (which appeals to reason and not to emotion) covers in depth.
By the way, racism and tobacco are legal. Are sites suggesting that you should boycott tobacco by threating you with disease and racists to bew banned? (The cigarette analogy was from the decision as was one case cited by the court involved exactly this - the NAACP was doing a boycott and one of their members made a much more direct threat against those breaking the boycott - this was considered protected speech).
The moment the standard becomes anything less than a direct threat, we will have a speech guestapo worse than anything you can imagine.
And don't assume that the liberals and pro-abortion side will always be in power. The first ammendment is designed to transcend such times.
Otherwise after the political wind shifts, or even the regulatory structure, a site that explains how to do an abortion might be banned because it encourages practicing medicine without a license, or because it incites people to murder (after abortion becomes illegal again).
If this were 1971 (pre roe-v-wade) would you ban such pro-abortion sites? That is exactly the danger. When your speech would have been the "guestapo tactics".
Some would only learn the value of the broad first ammendment the hard way. When we have the reverse of the status quo that happens to be in their favor at the moment.
Actually this is probably the reason I didn't renew my Libertarian party membership.
Thought crimes.
Web censorship.
Excessive fines (8th ammendment issue).
Who cares? Not the LP. They go into a tizzy at even the mildest attempt to prevent children from being used for pornography on the internet and say write half the western hemisphere in protest.
This REAL case treading on all the same points that the Computer Decency Act and others with actual defendants found guilty didn't elecit even a peep.
Probably because they didn't like the speech that was being banned.
But the true test of (small-l) libertarian principles is to defend things you disagree with.
Credit card numbers aren't normally part of any public record.
Your (residential) address usually is because you have to give that out to get a driver's license, and by extension the phone book that links the information makes that public info.
If your state happens to put identifiers up on the internet (sometimes for a fee - there are ads for publicdata.com or somesuch that play occasionally), you should move or not give out that information. Or get a private mailbox or PO box and voicemail number.
If I give out information, I cannot then claim it is private unless I as for nondisclosure in advance. Maybe that shouldn't be the state of things, and I would approve of any law designed to fix the situation.
Also, the plaintiffs in question were licensed professionals. Unless you want to argue against licensing (medicine or driving for that matter), which is one possibility, the information used to identify the license holder should be on the public record.
And what if they just linked to 411.com(?) or whatever other service would produce the exact same invasive data (consider 2600-DeCSS)?
I suspect the plaintiffs did little if anything to protect the information they were bothered about appearing on the defendant's site. Even if they did, once discovered (again like DeCSS), can they protect it? Where is the IP right in your address and phone number?
The article mentions hard drives and printers
He asks how to add a hard drive. Well, with an iMac you can't, so don't bother asking. Actually you can if you don't want any CDROM type device and shave a cable. Easy for the common man? The iBook hard drive is even harder.
And I CAN repartition my Linux ext2 drive without reformatting. (Windows still has problems with things having to be on C:, D:, or whereever the drive was enumerated when you installed the item). How do I repartition my iMac or iBook?
What about my SCSI tape drive? out of luck there. The FW/SCSI converters aren't stable (don't exist for OSX) and I can't add interfaces to most of the latest apple hardware.
Well, what about printouts? Most of the web pages I try printing (with 3 different browsers) still occasionally overlap images obscuring text. OSX gives me 1" margins and I haven't found anywhere to tell it I'm not going to create a matte portrait, but I would like to read with normal sized text and kill fewer trees.
Many printers don't have Mac drivers, and OSX hasn't included ghostscript, which linux does.
The problem with OSX is the same as with most of the "easy to use" interfaces. When they are good, they are very good, but when they are bad they are horrid. As long as I stay "in the box", and use newer mac approved hardware (oh, Linux runs on old 68k Macs and all the old powermacs - does OSX?), everything works beautifully. When I try to think different, it becomes impossible.
Linux has a steep learning curve, but once you've surmounted it, it is much like breaking the sound barrier. Things tend to go smoothly. The worst or hardest problems (if not proprietary hardware that you can't get info or help) are not that much more difficult than the simple things. Everything is so modular you can find the point of failure and fix it, or add the missing piece.
The final problem is the semantic confusion. OSX is Darwin (their mutant BSDerivative), plus Quartz plus apps plus other things. GNU/Linux is similarly the Linux kernel, lots of GNU tools, lots of other contributed things, and various apps. The integrated package OSX is more friendly than the integrated GNU/Linux is currently. But GNU/Linux is still growing.
If Apple really wanted to, they could have built OSX on Linux (and would have more filesystems - sometimes adding a disk means adding an existing disk with data).
For what its worth, I think Linux/PPC and Darwin, and by extension OSX will converge if not merge in 2-3 years. Add elf binary support and a few other shims to Darwin and you can run LinuxPPC binaries. Add a compatability layer to LinuxPPC and OSX would think its Darwin.
The biggest thing keeping them apart are the incompatible licenses. The second thing is the mutations to the gcc toolchain and the different IO, VFS, and such interfaces. They may or may not be better, but I can't easily redo a Linux driver or filesystem into Darwin even without worrying about GPL v.s. APSL. But I think these things will eventually happen.
I can't apply just the parts of the service packs that fix the holes. I also have to apply the parts that break the applications and/or drivers.
This is a design issue. I've often debugged Linux kernel modules inserting and removing them on a running system without affecting anything else.
It is extremely rare for a fix in one place on an non-microsoft system to have any effect (much less a disabling effect) on unrelated programs.
The incremental patch paradigm works better for mission critical systems, but Microsoft doesn't have that, just service packs and hotfixes.
They are running SP3 because applying anything later will render their system DEAD. If you can't run the application there is no point in having a secured system.
Why should they have to fix their software if they coded to Microsoft APIs using a Microsoft enviroment?
And I do blame the companies. If they hired the right people (or let them do things right) they wouldn't pick an OS where they have monolithic service packs. Their mistake was starting with Microsoft without allowing for recoding for every service pack.
1. Most things port to Darwin (the BSD layer), but there are a few complications. One linux complication is that gcc sometimes does bad things when pressed to optimize. But I've played DVDs under Linux/PPC. 2. Many AC3 ports don't resample - most Mac hardware has 44.1Khz as the highest sampling rate, not the 48KHz DVDs use, so someone needs to add a decimator. Once that is done, you can get sound. 3. Apple didn't provide a BSD layer to the DVD, so you need to use IOKit to do the key exchange with the DVD player using a completely different set of calls. They are in the header, but switching over the ioctls isn't trivial. This is if you want to use X or XAqua. 4. Then you need to use the graphics calls. Since X already uses them there should be an easy access to the framebuffer. I would love an Opensource DVD player to beat an official Apple player to OS X.
He can return the product for a full refund.
Unlike the product he produces.
Just don't expect anyone else to be able to read your documents. Office 97 when it first came out couldn't write Office 95 files, and O95 couldn't read O97, so you had to upgrade your entire office. Assuming the internet will reach into places like Africa, how do I send them a document when they will have to subscribe to read?
And will I be able to use it at my local library?
Also, trading a $350 one time cost for a $400/year bill eats into cash flow assuming current interest rates. You can get a loan or spread out a payment on your credit card if you have a cost v.s. cash flow problems. Maybe the dot-coms are bombing because the people running them don't understand basic economics and accounting.
And you will have reduced productivity because of the gratuitous changes in the upgrades and file format conversion time and whatever and you will have NO CONTROL over doing this.
so those with 56K modems will be forced to upgrade. I've seen a lot of the junk that comes down for the "newer" browsers and when it is not outright annoying, it merely wastes bandwidth.
.26 dot pitch monitors, Whatever IE Beta is out there with all the Windows plugins that don't work on Mac and Linux, and that then pop up a dozen ads?
I'm still waiting for the "Run Javascript" button so I don't get the annoying pop-ups (I leave it disabled because of this).
I also usually print out material. The web is designed to kill trees since most pages end up being narrow content surrounded by junk. A few sites have printer friendly versions.
Sometimes I run in emulation in 640x480. Many sites seem to have been designed for 1920x1440 full screen windows.
Who is pushing the move to sites that require a personal T1 to access in a reasonable amount of time, that require 25"
Lynx works. It even accesses frames individually, a trick that the versions of IE I have don't (I can disable them, but not do "frames as links").
It's about content. All this stuff is just noise. It might be pretty noise, but it is still mostly noise.
I'll leave the legal issues out for now
The problem is that only some of the sectors are encrypted, and you have to parse the IFO files. And I don't know if a multiple title DVD would have multiple keys and create a management issue.
Theoretically you could do it (probably as a patch to udffs, not the DVD layer), but you would have to determine what sectors were encrypted and which were not, and do the DVD ioctls to do the key handshake before you could access those sectors, then you would have to decrypt just those sectors and not the plaintext sectors.
In sum, you couldn't just do a loopback device css decryption (which might require doing the 2048 bytes sectors).
It also doesn't buy you much if you don't fix the bits that says the disk is encrypted to prevent double-decryption.
Since the DVD player needs to decode the IFO files anyway (which is why The Matrix doesn't work just sending the VOB to the decoder), you get the crypt/noncrypt info "for free".
Any DVD is mountable as udf and all I've seen as iso9660, so that isn't an issue.
And once the DVD has done the key exchange with the drive (css-auth), all sectors are available, but some are encrypted.
If someone knows of an easy way to figure out which title keys apply to which encrypted sectors without going through the effort of parsing everything it would be much easier.
At least not for a long while. First, you really need OS X (and probably a paid Apple Developer) to do things like sound and other hardware functions since Apple is delaying opensourcing those layers.
For example, there is no way of getting sound under just Darwin unless you write your own driver, which is going to be superceeded by the official Apple driver.
The Man pages are wrong under Darwin - describing hardware and devices that don't exist, things that are overridden and disabled (netinfo/lookupd acts like NIS), and the paths for data are wrong (lookupd's manpage points to nonexistent paths).
Within those limits, Darwin works very well and has some interesting IO and VFS concepts. I won't say better until I see them developed for. Apple has also done a lot of work on things like GCC, so many things "under the hood" work better under Darwin than LinuxPPC.
Right now, I can get sound and even some multimedia (I've played mpeg movies) under LinuxPPC. I can't under Darwin. Under darwin, lots of things barely work, and those that do are limited in features. Under Linux, the framebuffer console is fast and I can easily change modes and fonts under Linux.
Basically LinuxPPC is usable as an environment - I've actually got most things I do under x86 working under it. A few others are compiler or endian hiccups I can usually resolve
Darwin is almost useless as an environment, except to develop Darwin in situ. But it was intended as a server, which might be the problem. They don't want it to be too "cool". A full Darwin (with X windows, sound, multimedia, just like LinuxPPC) system won't be a threat to OS X, but I don't think Darwin will spark a lot of of creative Opensource development until it is as good as LinuxPPC without Quartz and the rest of OS X.
Right now, if you want to run a rich UNIX style environment on your Mac, LinuxPPC is the only viable alternative. For development, Darwin and it's toolchain is more Mac friendly. They both have their advantages.
And actually I see any rivalry as friendly. Darwin and Linux can learn a lot from each other, and I would rather have several good alternatives.
There have been reasons in the past Linus has rejected patches and created a small fork.
This is a problem because a production (4 is an even number) kernel is badly broken and Linus isn't accepting fixes.
Though I doubt it is anything sinister. Maybe he simply can't test the patches, or can't test them easily. Could someone ask Apple to send Linus an iMac or something if that is all that is stopping it?
I have an Alpha (UDB), Dual P3, Athlon, iMacDV, 486 notebook and iBookSE, and run linux on all, except the iBook but that is because I got it last night and I need to adapt a boot kernel/disk for the vid chip - it booted but the screen blanked.
So I would really like a working 2.4 kernel for my iBook and iMac from an unforked tree.