But since I can't get a decent broadcast NTSC signal, what are the chances that I'll be able to receive a decent broadcast HDTV signal? Seems to me that in my situation, buying the pre-July broadcast-flag-free HDTV tuner card is just a way to give the company a donation, and store another unused PCI card.
Is there any other option for someone stuck with cable/satellite to run myth-HDTV? I've heard about IR kludges and the like. Can that do it? What kind of signal comes out of the back side of the cable/satellite box, and is there a way to digitize it for MythTV. (At least last I checked, these questions weren't on the FAQ.)
In some ways it looks to me as if SCO is trying the "Microsoft defense," where you so outrage the judge that he/she makes some remark that can be construed as unprofessional, and then dig it all out on appeal. Microsoft successfully used this tactic against both Sporkin and Jackson. (if I remember the names correctly)
I just hope the phrase, "it is astonishing that SCO has not" isn't construed as sufficiently unprofessional to justify an appeal.
Just time and appearances. To consult another state means probably a minimum 15 minutes detention, and if exercised "arbitrarily" that looks more like a Police State. OTOH, with linked databases the check could be done in less than a minute from a hand-carried or car-mounted radio-PDA-type thing. Equally effective, less apparent intrusion.
As for the "don't like my face" thing, I'll use a semi-but-not-directly applicable analogy: The New York State Thruway of 10 or so years ago.
Back in those days, some states were starting to relax their 55MPH speed limits, but not New York. The NYST was posted at 55MPH, and practically everyone drove at 65-75MPH. Going 55MPH on the NYST was actually an endangerment to traffic, because everyone would have to move around you - a 55MPH car created a pinch-point on the highway. I heard once that the NYST Authority didn't want to raise the limit, because they feared the traffic would move up another 10MPH, consistently breaking the new limit by the same amount.
So essentially everyone on the road was a lawbreaker. The police could stop almost ANY car and issue at least a speeding ticket. In fact, since there were SO many cars speeding, it becomes an issue of picking the ones to stop. Any criteria could do, including fastest, weaving, etc - or ugliness. Plus a speeding ticket can easily get other stuff added like reckless endangerment, etc.
So do you know all laws that might apply to you, wherever you go? How about blue laws, usually not enforced? There's a website that highlights absurd laws related to sex, and a couple who wants to post pictures of themselves violating every one of them. (URL forgotten, sorry)
The real issue is, we're probably all lawbreakers in some way, at the very least breaking laws that are no longer enforced, but still on the books. Sometimes laws are used in odd ways - NPR has had at least one example recently about a 1900's era law that has found new applicability in international relations.
So no, a national ID doesn't cause abuse. It's just another enabler.
A National ID card becomes a calamity when it becomes a proof of your legitimacy.
A driver's license shows that you have met the necessary requirements to drive a motor vehicle. It also has verified identification information, so it's useful as an ID for flying. Some of that information is also age, so it's also useful for age-related purchases, like alcohol and tobacco.
The line is clearly crossed when you ID card is required for more arbitrary purposes - like standing in a place where someone doesn't like your face. Unlinked driver's licenses aren't terribly useful for that, linked ones are.
In Vermont they either still allow, or are just barely phasing out non-photo licenses. I went to a photo license a few years back to facilitate flying.
(1) No, middle initial only (2) Yes (3) Yes (4) Yes (5) No (see top comment) (6) Yes (7) Yes (8) Do you mean lamination? That's about it. (9) There is a magstripe on the back, no idea what's on it, or if it's even used.
Is there such a thing as a generic magstripe reader that can deliver the raw bits for inspection?
I seem to remember hearing Microsoft play that tune before - that the reason PCs are too expensive is because of the hardware.
Which product has nearly ZERO incremental cost of production, and which one has true cost for each and every unit sold?
Which company posted record profits, and which companies have razor-thin profit (or loss) margins?
The only way Microsoft is going to achieve the model of "hardware for free, buy the software" is when they produce both, and GIVE away the hardware and subsidize its costs through their software. They aren't even doing that for the X-Box.
Productive employees get "downsized or offshored" with not much more than a kick in the butt. Your "employees get fired" implies that the employee was doing something wrong, or at least turning in inadequate performance. But I'll bet that in the last 5 years, more productive employees have lost their jobs than unproductive or incompetent ones.
Somehow, I don't quite believe this is "capitalism" when the execs live by a different law of supply and demand than the employees.
The other day I got an offer to sign up for "premium" broadband internet, with somewhat higher bandwidth than I'm getting now, and of course a higher fee. I don't know what my "guaranteed" bandwidth is, but now I'm waiting for it to get capped.
OTOH, DSL just became available to me. Adelphia or Verizon? Freddie or Jason? Abbot or Costello?
Holding security holes private for a limited time does make sense, but the key word is *limited*. That delay is there for the sole purpose of making sure the fix is available when the hole is disclosed. The limited part means that nobody sits on security holes, and if it becomes public without a fix, the community kicks in. Even if a fix is announced along with the hole, it's entirely possible that the community will come up with a better/cleaner fix.
I wonder if a high-altitude skim could be constructed that could use the solar sail itself for aerobraking. It would be touchy, at best. Too high, and it would do nothing. Too deep, and it would rip itself to pieces, as well as breaking the shroud lines.
Science Fiction reference: "Flight of the Dragonfly" by Robert L Forward ***** minor spoiler *****
The solar sail was designed to be partitioned en-route. At the appropriate time, the outer (forget the fraction) of the sail was disconnected from the inner fraction and the spacecraft. But since it was in space, and presumably had at least a little spin, it stayed reasonably unfurled.
Then the launch laser beam arrived from Earth, and hit the separated outer sail. It popped inside out from the light force, and focused the light back on the inner sail that was still attached to the spacecraft. This accelerated the outer sail harder, but supplied decelerating force to the inner sail and spacecraft. The inner sail also received some of the beam from Earth on the wrong side, but that was much less than the focused beam from the outer sail.
In Burlington, Vt, there used to be a restaurant called Carbur's, which used to have funny menus. Vt also has a Representative to Congress named Bernie Sanders (I, Vt) who used to be the Mayor of Burlington, and used to call himself a Socialist.
Carbur's used to have a sandwitch in honor of Bernie, called "The Red Herring," and it was "priced according to your ability to pay." That harkens back to a prime tenet of Communism, "from each according to his abilities."
The irony here is that Microsoft claims to be Capitalist, denounces Linux as Communist, and then with their so-called "starter editions" is itself engaging in what could be called, "Communist pricing."
He was promoted from one of the Other 4 Motorcyclists of the Apocolypse, along with his friends, Things That Need a Really Good Thumping, (mumble), and (mumble, haven't re-read Good Omens recently enough).
Oh, Grevious is really short for Grevious Bodily Harm.
Specifically, as long as no new features are used, every version of every Office program should be able to exchange every Office document. There shouldn't be any of this, Office 95 can't read Office 97 files, and Office 97 can't read Office 2k files, etc.
Of course the new version will want to come out with new features. But the reader architecture should have been smart enough to recognize that it can't handle something, realize it's a new feature, and prompt the user for some sort of action. This isn't rocket science.
Sometimes it's even possible that there just may be a better storage architecture, and it's time to break backward compatiblity. That happens. But it shouldn't happen every single release. The fact that the settings can be tweaked to save in old formats by default, combined with the fact that there are companies happily running that way, suggest to me (and others) that MS uses file format changes to "urge" upgrades.
I guess I never have claimed to be a "pure capitalist." In fact, check my postings, and you'll see that I insist that the free market requires outside assistance in order to remain healthy.
One of the things that kind of torques me is the, "Greed is good!" mentality that came to the fore in the 80's. While it's useless and stupid to deny greed, as the prime tenet of communism does, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," that's a far cry from declaring it to be good. IMHO, greed exists, can't be denied, and can motivate people, but it isn't good. In fact, it tends to motivate people to do bad things. But to deny greed is folly, so it's a good idea to figure out how to work with it, and keep it within sane limits. (unlike the current U.S.)
I forgot to add, with respect to nVidia and ATI...
The reality is that there are at most about a half-dozen parties who could make any effective use of nVidia or ATI chip-level IP. Those half-dozen players have most likely already purchased reverse-engineering reports, or done it themselves. I'm sure nVidia and ATI *know* what's on each other's chips, if only for the purpose of IP lawsuits. That's also probably someone in each company, not the designers, themselves. Gotta keep those blinders properly aligned to avoid treble damages. (Linus said this, too.)
No, the real reason to not document your products "properly" is that it costs money. Typically, engineering documents that stay in-house are written by the designers themselves, and are not of the "quality" to release outside. They tend to lack polish, they may require follow-up phone calls to clarify points, and most especially, they reveal bugs and design compromises. External publications are done by separate tech-writers who know how to polish and remove embarassments - and incidentally, draw a separate paycheck. Plus external documentation draws pesky questions, and requires more salary to answer the phone.
It's much cheaper to just ship drivers and say, "Trust me with the details."
Putting my William Gibson hat on for a moment... In Gibson's worlds, governments are somewhat shrunken and corporations are much more powerful. Though the NSA-equivalent is still to be feared, corporate espionage is just much so.
Back to reality... As we wish that nVidia and ATI would release specs for Open Source drivers, we hear about how they fear giving information to competitors, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, there are companies that reverse-engineer chips, selling layouts, block diagrams, and schematics. I've seen them, and I've had it done to me.
In these litiganous time, such "discovery" is how you decide who to sue for infringing on your IP. IP has become big business, and while I'm sure that keys to encrypted documents could be dragged out in court, I'm equally sure that some folks would kind of like to bypass that part of the mess. This is especially true, considering social aspects. "If this document is encrypted, I don't have to be as careful with its physical or network acces."
How far are we really, until corporate espionage takes on Gibson-like attributes?
If it were capitalism, the executives would be subject to the same market forces as the employees, and wouldn't be able to get away with abuses like this. The difference: When an executive screws up, they get forced out, but it's called something else, like "spending more time with the family" or "finding new challenges" and it's accompanied with a big bonus. Take a look at the guy from Fanny Mae, for instance. He got almost $1e7 in bonus, and a higher retirement pay than I get for working salary. And he left for screwing up. As a contrast, employees may be doing a perfectly fine job, and be declared "surplus," and have to scramble for a new job, because they don't get golden parachutes. I know some, and they were neither deadwood nor excess fat.
I tried to express that it's not so much DRAM itself as the fact that it's packaged separately that causes the delay. I won't argue that the DRAM isn't "slow" as to say that even if it had no latency, you'd still be waiting almost as long because of buffer, wiring, cross-chip, and connector delays necessary to put that DRAM up on a DIMM.
It's also worth understanding the driving forces behind DRAM "slowness". First off, DRAM technology is driven by price and density, with performance being a distant third shared with power and data-retention interval. (How long between refreshes) DRAM doesn't get fancy-pants fast transistors, they get CHEAP transistors. For that matter, the access transistor for the cell itself simply CAN'T be fast, because it has a far more important job - it has to shut OFF. When you're talking tens-of-thousands of electrons, you can't afford to carelessly lose of any of them. I know/. articles talk of storing a bit on the spin of one electron, but we ain't there, yet. Second, the basic DRAM sense is a charge-share operation. It's not current flowing in the conventional sense, it's transient. Furthermore, it involves waiting long enough to get enough charge to sense, yet not so long as to appear too "slow".
Every now and then, someone wants to come along and make "fast" DRAM. DRAM can be made faster, there are some simple tradeoffs that allow it to be done. But people continue to buy primarily the cheap stuff.
Reminds me of an old concept called "Single Level Store."
With SLS, there is essentially only "memory," defined by the disk space. The DRAM that we think of as main memory becomes just another level of cache - a cache of the full memory space, which is implemented on disk. (Presumably the full memory space could be implemented in other ways - across a cluster, SAN, etc.) Part of implementing this is a thing called "inverted page tables" that were part of IBM midrange systems beginning with the System/38 and also on the Romp and POWER series. (I don't know if it's still on current POWER or POWERPC chips.)
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But since I can't get a decent broadcast NTSC signal, what are the chances that I'll be able to receive a decent broadcast HDTV signal? Seems to me that in my situation, buying the pre-July broadcast-flag-free HDTV tuner card is just a way to give the company a donation, and store another unused PCI card.
Is there any other option for someone stuck with cable/satellite to run myth-HDTV? I've heard about IR kludges and the like. Can that do it? What kind of signal comes out of the back side of the cable/satellite box, and is there a way to digitize it for MythTV. (At least last I checked, these questions weren't on the FAQ.)
Alert Elliot Spitzer???
In some ways it looks to me as if SCO is trying the "Microsoft defense," where you so outrage the judge that he/she makes some remark that can be construed as unprofessional, and then dig it all out on appeal. Microsoft successfully used this tactic against both Sporkin and Jackson. (if I remember the names correctly)
I just hope the phrase, "it is astonishing that SCO has not" isn't construed as sufficiently unprofessional to justify an appeal.
Just time and appearances. To consult another state means probably a minimum 15 minutes detention, and if exercised "arbitrarily" that looks more like a Police State. OTOH, with linked databases the check could be done in less than a minute from a hand-carried or car-mounted radio-PDA-type thing. Equally effective, less apparent intrusion.
A national ID doesn't cause anything.
It enables many things, some good, some bad.
As for the "don't like my face" thing, I'll use a semi-but-not-directly applicable analogy: The New York State Thruway of 10 or so years ago.
Back in those days, some states were starting to relax their 55MPH speed limits, but not New York. The NYST was posted at 55MPH, and practically everyone drove at 65-75MPH. Going 55MPH on the NYST was actually an endangerment to traffic, because everyone would have to move around you - a 55MPH car created a pinch-point on the highway. I heard once that the NYST Authority didn't want to raise the limit, because they feared the traffic would move up another 10MPH, consistently breaking the new limit by the same amount.
So essentially everyone on the road was a lawbreaker. The police could stop almost ANY car and issue at least a speeding ticket. In fact, since there were SO many cars speeding, it becomes an issue of picking the ones to stop. Any criteria could do, including fastest, weaving, etc - or ugliness. Plus a speeding ticket can easily get other stuff added like reckless endangerment, etc.
So do you know all laws that might apply to you, wherever you go? How about blue laws, usually not enforced? There's a website that highlights absurd laws related to sex, and a couple who wants to post pictures of themselves violating every one of them. (URL forgotten, sorry)
The real issue is, we're probably all lawbreakers in some way, at the very least breaking laws that are no longer enforced, but still on the books. Sometimes laws are used in odd ways - NPR has had at least one example recently about a 1900's era law that has found new applicability in international relations.
So no, a national ID doesn't cause abuse. It's just another enabler.
A National ID card becomes a calamity when it becomes a proof of your legitimacy.
A driver's license shows that you have met the necessary requirements to drive a motor vehicle. It also has verified identification information, so it's useful as an ID for flying. Some of that information is also age, so it's also useful for age-related purchases, like alcohol and tobacco.
The line is clearly crossed when you ID card is required for more arbitrary purposes - like standing in a place where someone doesn't like your face. Unlinked driver's licenses aren't terribly useful for that, linked ones are.
In Vermont they either still allow, or are just barely phasing out non-photo licenses. I went to a photo license a few years back to facilitate flying.
(1) No, middle initial only
(2) Yes
(3) Yes
(4) Yes
(5) No (see top comment)
(6) Yes
(7) Yes
(8) Do you mean lamination? That's about it.
(9) There is a magstripe on the back, no idea what's on it, or if it's even used.
Is there such a thing as a generic magstripe reader that can deliver the raw bits for inspection?
I've gotten quite a bit of email from Washington Mutual, lately. They want me to verify my account at their web site.
I'd really love to help them out, but I don't have a Washington Mutual account. Maybe I should direct them to that guy in Nigeria.
I seem to remember hearing Microsoft play that tune before - that the reason PCs are too expensive is because of the hardware.
Which product has nearly ZERO incremental cost of production, and which one has true cost for each and every unit sold?
Which company posted record profits, and which companies have razor-thin profit (or loss) margins?
The only way Microsoft is going to achieve the model of "hardware for free, buy the software" is when they produce both, and GIVE away the hardware and subsidize its costs through their software. They aren't even doing that for the X-Box.
You understate.
Productive employees get "downsized or offshored" with not much more than a kick in the butt. Your "employees get fired" implies that the employee was doing something wrong, or at least turning in inadequate performance. But I'll bet that in the last 5 years, more productive employees have lost their jobs than unproductive or incompetent ones.
Somehow, I don't quite believe this is "capitalism" when the execs live by a different law of supply and demand than the employees.
The other day I got an offer to sign up for "premium" broadband internet, with somewhat higher bandwidth than I'm getting now, and of course a higher fee. I don't know what my "guaranteed" bandwidth is, but now I'm waiting for it to get capped.
OTOH, DSL just became available to me.
Adelphia or Verizon?
Freddie or Jason?
Abbot or Costello?
Holding security holes private for a limited time does make sense, but the key word is *limited*. That delay is there for the sole purpose of making sure the fix is available when the hole is disclosed. The limited part means that nobody sits on security holes, and if it becomes public without a fix, the community kicks in. Even if a fix is announced along with the hole, it's entirely possible that the community will come up with a better/cleaner fix.
Keeping "limited delay" short is the key.
I wonder if a high-altitude skim could be constructed that could use the solar sail itself for aerobraking. It would be touchy, at best. Too high, and it would do nothing. Too deep, and it would rip itself to pieces, as well as breaking the shroud lines.
Science Fiction reference:
"Flight of the Dragonfly" by Robert L Forward
***** minor spoiler *****
The solar sail was designed to be partitioned en-route. At the appropriate time, the outer (forget the fraction) of the sail was disconnected from the inner fraction and the spacecraft. But since it was in space, and presumably had at least a little spin, it stayed reasonably unfurled.
Then the launch laser beam arrived from Earth, and hit the separated outer sail. It popped inside out from the light force, and focused the light back on the inner sail that was still attached to the spacecraft. This accelerated the outer sail harder, but supplied decelerating force to the inner sail and spacecraft. The inner sail also received some of the beam from Earth on the wrong side, but that was much less than the focused beam from the outer sail.
In Burlington, Vt, there used to be a restaurant called Carbur's, which used to have funny menus. Vt also has a Representative to Congress named Bernie Sanders (I, Vt) who used to be the Mayor of Burlington, and used to call himself a Socialist.
Carbur's used to have a sandwitch in honor of Bernie, called "The Red Herring," and it was "priced according to your ability to pay." That harkens back to a prime tenet of Communism, "from each according to his abilities."
The irony here is that Microsoft claims to be Capitalist, denounces Linux as Communist, and then with their so-called "starter editions" is itself engaging in what could be called, "Communist pricing."
I think Terry Gilliam could have done it justice. Too bad he's out of the running, but maybe he'll come back.
I guess I'm not sure anyone but Terry Gilliam could do the job, in which case I sort of agree with you.
Sorry, but no new news since June 2002 about the movie. We can always hope.
He was promoted from one of the Other 4 Motorcyclists of the Apocolypse, along with his friends, Things That Need a Really Good Thumping, (mumble), and (mumble, haven't re-read Good Omens recently enough).
Oh, Grevious is really short for Grevious Bodily Harm.
Specifically, as long as no new features are used, every version of every Office program should be able to exchange every Office document. There shouldn't be any of this, Office 95 can't read Office 97 files, and Office 97 can't read Office 2k files, etc.
Of course the new version will want to come out with new features. But the reader architecture should have been smart enough to recognize that it can't handle something, realize it's a new feature, and prompt the user for some sort of action. This isn't rocket science.
Sometimes it's even possible that there just may be a better storage architecture, and it's time to break backward compatiblity. That happens. But it shouldn't happen every single release. The fact that the settings can be tweaked to save in old formats by default, combined with the fact that there are companies happily running that way, suggest to me (and others) that MS uses file format changes to "urge" upgrades.
I guess I never have claimed to be a "pure capitalist." In fact, check my postings, and you'll see that I insist that the free market requires outside assistance in order to remain healthy.
One of the things that kind of torques me is the, "Greed is good!" mentality that came to the fore in the 80's. While it's useless and stupid to deny greed, as the prime tenet of communism does, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," that's a far cry from declaring it to be good. IMHO, greed exists, can't be denied, and can motivate people, but it isn't good. In fact, it tends to motivate people to do bad things. But to deny greed is folly, so it's a good idea to figure out how to work with it, and keep it within sane limits. (unlike the current U.S.)
I forgot to add, with respect to nVidia and ATI...
The reality is that there are at most about a half-dozen parties who could make any effective use of nVidia or ATI chip-level IP. Those half-dozen players have most likely already purchased reverse-engineering reports, or done it themselves. I'm sure nVidia and ATI *know* what's on each other's chips, if only for the purpose of IP lawsuits. That's also probably someone in each company, not the designers, themselves. Gotta keep those blinders properly aligned to avoid treble damages. (Linus said this, too.)
No, the real reason to not document your products "properly" is that it costs money. Typically, engineering documents that stay in-house are written by the designers themselves, and are not of the "quality" to release outside. They tend to lack polish, they may require follow-up phone calls to clarify points, and most especially, they reveal bugs and design compromises. External publications are done by separate tech-writers who know how to polish and remove embarassments - and incidentally, draw a separate paycheck. Plus external documentation draws pesky questions, and requires more salary to answer the phone.
It's much cheaper to just ship drivers and say, "Trust me with the details."
Putting my William Gibson hat on for a moment...
In Gibson's worlds, governments are somewhat shrunken and corporations are much more powerful. Though the NSA-equivalent is still to be feared, corporate espionage is just much so.
Back to reality...
As we wish that nVidia and ATI would release specs for Open Source drivers, we hear about how they fear giving information to competitors, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, there are companies that reverse-engineer chips, selling layouts, block diagrams, and schematics. I've seen them, and I've had it done to me.
In these litiganous time, such "discovery" is how you decide who to sue for infringing on your IP. IP has become big business, and while I'm sure that keys to encrypted documents could be dragged out in court, I'm equally sure that some folks would kind of like to bypass that part of the mess. This is especially true, considering social aspects. "If this document is encrypted, I don't have to be as careful with its physical or network acces."
How far are we really, until corporate espionage takes on Gibson-like attributes?
It's oligarchy.
If it were capitalism, the executives would be subject to the same market forces as the employees, and wouldn't be able to get away with abuses like this. The difference:
When an executive screws up, they get forced out, but it's called something else, like "spending more time with the family" or "finding new challenges" and it's accompanied with a big bonus. Take a look at the guy from Fanny Mae, for instance. He got almost $1e7 in bonus, and a higher retirement pay than I get for working salary. And he left for screwing up.
As a contrast, employees may be doing a perfectly fine job, and be declared "surplus," and have to scramble for a new job, because they don't get golden parachutes. I know some, and they were neither deadwood nor excess fat.
"Moving Mars" by Greg Bear
/. mentality in it.
They had spray-on emergency space suits, used during a student protest on a future Mars. The scene had some elements of
I tried to express that it's not so much DRAM itself as the fact that it's packaged separately that causes the delay. I won't argue that the DRAM isn't "slow" as to say that even if it had no latency, you'd still be waiting almost as long because of buffer, wiring, cross-chip, and connector delays necessary to put that DRAM up on a DIMM.
/. articles talk of storing a bit on the spin of one electron, but we ain't there, yet. Second, the basic DRAM sense is a charge-share operation. It's not current flowing in the conventional sense, it's transient. Furthermore, it involves waiting long enough to get enough charge to sense, yet not so long as to appear too "slow".
It's also worth understanding the driving forces behind DRAM "slowness". First off, DRAM technology is driven by price and density, with performance being a distant third shared with power and data-retention interval. (How long between refreshes) DRAM doesn't get fancy-pants fast transistors, they get CHEAP transistors. For that matter, the access transistor for the cell itself simply CAN'T be fast, because it has a far more important job - it has to shut OFF. When you're talking tens-of-thousands of electrons, you can't afford to carelessly lose of any of them. I know
Every now and then, someone wants to come along and make "fast" DRAM. DRAM can be made faster, there are some simple tradeoffs that allow it to be done. But people continue to buy primarily the cheap stuff.
Reminds me of an old concept called "Single Level Store."
With SLS, there is essentially only "memory," defined by the disk space. The DRAM that we think of as main memory becomes just another level of cache - a cache of the full memory space, which is implemented on disk. (Presumably the full memory space could be implemented in other ways - across a cluster, SAN, etc.) Part of implementing this is a thing called "inverted page tables" that were part of IBM midrange systems beginning with the System/38 and also on the Romp and POWER series. (I don't know if it's still on current POWER or POWERPC chips.)