It's bad enough that RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and the various other RPM-based distributions have diverged enough that their packages are largely incompatible. But then you get into RH7.x vs RH8 vs RH9 vs Fedora, and the same with the others.
Up until then, I'd had some control over 7 boxen running RedHat, mostly RH8. I never moved to RH9 because I didn't like the emerging direction. Starting to cast about for a new distribution, I began to realize that I was thinking of support for family, etc, and not *fun*.
My dual-boot work laptop now runs Gentoo, as does my second (up and coming) server. Other systems are waiting for me to get more comfortable, and for the various nForce2 patches to stabilize and hopefully get into the mainline kernel.
Gentoo has been a mixed bag. Package install is a breeze, far better than RedHat, as long as you don't mind a minor wait. Configuration is 'a learning experience.' (not all bad, but slow)
Limits of consciousness (in the book expressed as limits of observation) figure prominently into the end of the book, so I've probably spoiled it a little already. It's also a good book because it's an *early* treatment of nano/bio tech.
Just for jollies, read in sequence: "Childhood's End", by Arthur C. Clarke "The Harvest", by Robert Charles Wilson "Blood Music", by Greg Bear It walks you down an interesting path.
You also need to think about a replacement/repair mechanism for nonliving tissue. Think about 'basement membrane', the nonliving stuff that does a lot to define our shape. Laid down at 'original construction' the mechanisms for nonliving tissue repair are varied. Bone does pretty well, but the membranes don't. Think scar tissue. Think sagging cheeks, breasts, etc. Think face-lifts and the characteristic look that accompanies having had too many. We'd have to engineer a whole new process for membrane repair.
Any science fiction matter transporter really works by scanning the original, making a copy at the destination, and destroying the original. Usually they squeamishly avoid the potential paradoxen by making the scanning process itself destructive.
But any number of Star Trek 'transporter accident' episodes devolve from the separation of these steps. Including the fact that *there is a pattern buffer* and only the readily-available matter supply prevents you from marching an army of yourself out of the transporter.
In "The Saga of Cuckoo" (author's name forgotten) their transporter clearly works by copying, and they touch on what happens when copies meet, including copies taken at different times and copies of friends you hadn't met, yet.
Partly addressed on the next line, with respect to the artists. Adobe spends a lot of money developing the piece of IP known as Photoshop, and that's reflected in the purchase price. Furthermore, if Photoshop is *too* overpriced, (The 'premier' product in a given market can charge a premium, after all.) competition will rectify the situation.
Honestly, I can't say much about RIAA members' balance sheets. But if you believe Courtney Love, and any other number of artists who have gone public, once you add up the plastic AND the IP costs, there's still an obscene markup.
My point wasn't in support of downloads. My point wasn't to accuse the RIAA of stealing and making obscene profits, or any other moral or ethical argument.
My point was, given that physical costs are low, and artists are poorly paid, (meaning IP costs are low) they still complain about poor revenue and profits. I suspect that due to the protection from competition offered by copyright, RIAA business practices have grown fat and lazy to excess. They're not very profitable, because they've never had to really work to control their costs. IMHO, they leak money all over the place, and if they were in any unprotected business, they'd be out in a flash. They're just plain inefficient.
Leave aside moral judgements, for a moment. Start with one concrete fact, and one heavily-anecdotally-documented fact.
The RIAA takes some plastic that costs well under a buck, and sells it for over $15.00 The RIAA generally pays most artists very little, perhaps less than they could get in a 'real' job.
IMHO, this brands them as one of LEAST EFFICIENT INDUSTRIES in the world. If they have over 1000% markup and complain about not making profit, then their business practices are terrible. Absent copyright law, which gives them a monopoly, they'd be out of business in a flash given any sort of competition.
Sorry, I'd like to participate, but I can't. I know it won't die without me, but I fear more broadband ISPs taking on equally moronic TOS. The stance isn't entirely without merit, since Joe 6pak has no business running a server on today's Internet. But there's also no way to prove competence, and even if there were, I'm sure ISPs would be eager to charge me double.
Your car has locks on the door. In many (though not all) parts of the country, you can lock the car, get a ride to get gas, and return expecting to find a car to refuel.
Both the Segway and bike are small enough to steal, so you can't leave either by the road. But even with a flat, a bike is fairly easy to push along.
Failures happen. You need to make sure you always have a recovery posture. When driving in winter, I always make sure my footwear and other clothing is good enough to handle any walk from a breakdown on my route. The Segway seems poor in this respect.
But is production of more people in itself a worthwhile goal? Maybe we CAN fit more people on the Earth, but should we?
We can do as you say, produce more food, and distribute it better. But in order to do so, we would have to dismantle/modify/reorganize many current behaviors and institutions. Not that those institutions don't of themselves deserve to be dismantled/modified/reorganized, but for the SOLE END of sustaining more people?
IMHO, there's an ideal human population, related to many things, including technology level, and it's a really broad range. Also IMHO, at the moment we're past the high end, primarily due to locality problems, which is what you're saying. But there are other issues besides technology and locality, and to some extent, more people make more problems. Given a finite (though flexible) resource, more people means less resource per person. This is not a simple issue.
Gentoo normally builds software on the target machine. Moreover, it encourages customization, so you're much less likely to find identical binaries on Gentoo machines.
GRSecurity has some sort of randomization feature for loading shared libs.
It wouldn't be hard, and maybe has been done, to include some sort of randomization features in the link step. (I've wondered about this as a way for virii to escape scanners.)
Also, ultimately SELinux, LIDS, GRSecurity, and the like also mitigate the all-powerful nature of root. This capability needs to become more common. More work needs to be done on these tools to make their deployment easier and more common.
To take the 'firewall in a building' analogy a little further, the firewall itself isn't even meant to be non-flammable.
The purpose of a firewall in a building is to buy time. Time for people to escape. Time for the Fire Department to get there and get to work. Perhaps, but less important, time for removal/protection of unusually valuable property.
Perhaps in the computing industry we think too much of our firewalls, even if they don't have flammable bells and whistles on them.
But last I knew, ftp and smtp worked on DOS, Windows, OS/2, Linux, Unix, and who knows what else, without a pile of kludges for backward compatibility.
Standards should be as clear and simple as possible. (and no simpler, though you can never get too much clarity in a standard) Part of the problem happens when things may not have been intended to be a Standard, but became so though wide usage. Another part happens when 'clear and simple' are not only not followed, but are deliberately avoided in order to establish a 'proprietary standard'.
I wish someone would do a decent job of porting the OS/2 WPS to Linux. It was the only gui that was able to keep me away from a command line for any significant amount of time. Most of the time, to do 'real work' I just open an xterm. (or dos prompt, under Windows) Under OS/2, I found I could actually function well under the WPS, though I still had to drop to a command prompt at times.
The WPS took the 'objects' on the screen and truly made them into objects, in the programming sense, rather than make them behave roughly like objects with file and drag/drop associations and the like.
I can agree to use 'signed drivers' to control all hardware in a signal path. I can forsee setting up a 'trusted' section in the kernel, that when in the 'trusted' state, even (the owner) I can't tamper with it, and know that it has its own verifiable integrity mechanisms.
As for ripping chips and getting keys, I've had some indirect contact with people who do crypto chips, and those things are awfully tamper-resistant. Whether a tamper-resistant chip is cheap enough to mass market is another question. But it's really like a very good lock on a door. An ordinary lock is meant to be secure against most people. A really good lock may conceivably fall only to government spooks.
That's why I talked about 'trust grant' later in the post. If I don't own the keys, I don't want DRM. But if I do own the keys, I'm willing to temporarily surrender some control in order to allow someone else to trust me enough to deliver content.
This then becomes an intersection of trust sets: I trust them a certain amount, and no more, and they trust me a certain amount, an no more. Hopefully the intersection of those two trust sets has sufficient capabilities to play DVDs and music.
But in order to be truly useful, entering into the 'trust grant' shouldn't render the box useless for multitasking on other things, and the other party should be tightly confined to their sandbox.
Naaaah, we'll get DRM shoved down our throats, the owners won't be trusted, and everyone (media and software companies, government, and crackers) will have access to our boxes except the owners.
There is some discussion of TCPA from some guy from IBM, insisting that it isn't all bad, *as long as the user retains control*. What we all really fear about "Trusted Computing" is that WE (the computer owner/user) are the ones who are *not* trusted.
The real pain in all of this is that there is some good in Trusted Computing, if done properly. Unfortunately things are polarizing into two camps, corporations using DRM to protect THEIR property against their customers, and NO DRM AT ALL. Trusted Computing done properly is lost in the shuffle, but if I had to pick one of the other two, I'd take no DRM at all.
I suspect that what we *REALLY* need is some sort of 'grant trust' relationship. The computer trusts ME, but I give it a 'grant trust' to Pixar so I can watch one of their movies, and give them some reason to trust me. But at the same time, I never surrender control of my machine, just agree not to do certain things while the 'grant trust' is active.
Slashdot Mirror
I've even heard some recommendations for -Os, (optimize for size) because cache limitations may be more significant than other factors.
Perhaps the best part of Gentoo.
It's bad enough that RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and the various other RPM-based distributions have diverged enough that their packages are largely incompatible. But then you get into RH7.x vs RH8 vs RH9 vs Fedora, and the same with the others.
With Gentoo, update really means update.
I recently switched some of my boxes to Gentoo.
Up until then, I'd had some control over 7 boxen running RedHat, mostly RH8. I never moved to RH9 because I didn't like the emerging direction. Starting to cast about for a new distribution, I began to realize that I was thinking of support for family, etc, and not *fun*.
My dual-boot work laptop now runs Gentoo, as does my second (up and coming) server. Other systems are waiting for me to get more comfortable, and for the various nForce2 patches to stabilize and hopefully get into the mainline kernel.
Gentoo has been a mixed bag. Package install is a breeze, far better than RedHat, as long as you don't mind a minor wait. Configuration is 'a learning experience.' (not all bad, but slow)
Read "Blood Music" by Greg Bear.
Limits of consciousness (in the book expressed as limits of observation) figure prominently into the end of the book, so I've probably spoiled it a little already. It's also a good book because it's an *early* treatment of nano/bio tech.
Just for jollies, read in sequence:
"Childhood's End", by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Harvest", by Robert Charles Wilson
"Blood Music", by Greg Bear
It walks you down an interesting path.
You also need to think about a replacement/repair mechanism for nonliving tissue. Think about 'basement membrane', the nonliving stuff that does a lot to define our shape. Laid down at 'original construction' the mechanisms for nonliving tissue repair are varied. Bone does pretty well, but the membranes don't. Think scar tissue. Think sagging cheeks, breasts, etc. Think face-lifts and the characteristic look that accompanies having had too many. We'd have to engineer a whole new process for membrane repair.
Any science fiction matter transporter really works by scanning the original, making a copy at the destination, and destroying the original. Usually they squeamishly avoid the potential paradoxen by making the scanning process itself destructive.
But any number of Star Trek 'transporter accident' episodes devolve from the separation of these steps. Including the fact that *there is a pattern buffer* and only the readily-available matter supply prevents you from marching an army of yourself out of the transporter.
In "The Saga of Cuckoo" (author's name forgotten) their transporter clearly works by copying, and they touch on what happens when copies meet, including copies taken at different times and copies of friends you hadn't met, yet.
Partly addressed on the next line, with respect to the artists. Adobe spends a lot of money developing the piece of IP known as Photoshop, and that's reflected in the purchase price. Furthermore, if Photoshop is *too* overpriced, (The 'premier' product in a given market can charge a premium, after all.) competition will rectify the situation.
Honestly, I can't say much about RIAA members' balance sheets. But if you believe Courtney Love, and any other number of artists who have gone public, once you add up the plastic AND the IP costs, there's still an obscene markup.
My point wasn't in support of downloads.
My point wasn't to accuse the RIAA of stealing and making obscene profits, or any other moral or ethical argument.
My point was, given that physical costs are low, and artists are poorly paid, (meaning IP costs are low) they still complain about poor revenue and profits. I suspect that due to the protection from competition offered by copyright, RIAA business practices have grown fat and lazy to excess. They're not very profitable, because they've never had to really work to control their costs. IMHO, they leak money all over the place, and if they were in any unprotected business, they'd be out in a flash. They're just plain inefficient.
Leave aside moral judgements, for a moment. Start with one concrete fact, and one heavily-anecdotally-documented fact.
The RIAA takes some plastic that costs well under a buck, and sells it for over $15.00
The RIAA generally pays most artists very little, perhaps less than they could get in a 'real' job.
IMHO, this brands them as one of LEAST EFFICIENT INDUSTRIES in the world. If they have over 1000% markup and complain about not making profit, then their business practices are terrible. Absent copyright law, which gives them a monopoly, they'd be out of business in a flash given any sort of competition.
Adelphia.net:
NO SERVERS OF ANY KIND
Sorry, I'd like to participate, but I can't. I know it won't die without me, but I fear more broadband ISPs taking on equally moronic TOS. The stance isn't entirely without merit, since Joe 6pak has no business running a server on today's Internet. But there's also no way to prove competence, and even if there were, I'm sure ISPs would be eager to charge me double.
Didn't the local theater owners get upset when workers brought in popcorn for 'disposal' and it glowed in the dark?
Your car has locks on the door. In many (though not all) parts of the country, you can lock the car, get a ride to get gas, and return expecting to find a car to refuel.
Both the Segway and bike are small enough to steal, so you can't leave either by the road. But even with a flat, a bike is fairly easy to push along.
Failures happen. You need to make sure you always have a recovery posture. When driving in winter, I always make sure my footwear and other clothing is good enough to handle any walk from a breakdown on my route. The Segway seems poor in this respect.
But is production of more people in itself a worthwhile goal?
Maybe we CAN fit more people on the Earth, but should we?
We can do as you say, produce more food, and distribute it better. But in order to do so, we would have to dismantle/modify/reorganize many current behaviors and institutions. Not that those institutions don't of themselves deserve to be dismantled/modified/reorganized, but for the SOLE END of sustaining more people?
IMHO, there's an ideal human population, related to many things, including technology level, and it's a really broad range. Also IMHO, at the moment we're past the high end, primarily due to locality problems, which is what you're saying. But there are other issues besides technology and locality, and to some extent, more people make more problems. Given a finite (though flexible) resource, more people means less resource per person. This is not a simple issue.
Good answer.
Which differs from the previous quest to remove Clinton from the white house at ALL COSTS in what way?
Not to mention the SIQ...
It wasn't perfect, but it was still the GUI that least forced me to use a command prompt.
Gentoo normally builds software on the target machine. Moreover, it encourages customization, so you're much less likely to find identical binaries on Gentoo machines.
GRSecurity has some sort of randomization feature for loading shared libs.
It wouldn't be hard, and maybe has been done, to include some sort of randomization features in the link step. (I've wondered about this as a way for virii to escape scanners.)
Also, ultimately SELinux, LIDS, GRSecurity, and the like also mitigate the all-powerful nature of root. This capability needs to become more common. More work needs to be done on these tools to make their deployment easier and more common.
To take the 'firewall in a building' analogy a little further, the firewall itself isn't even meant to be non-flammable.
The purpose of a firewall in a building is to buy time.
Time for people to escape.
Time for the Fire Department to get there and get to work.
Perhaps, but less important, time for removal/protection of unusually valuable property.
Perhaps in the computing industry we think too much of our firewalls, even if they don't have flammable bells and whistles on them.
And we'd all be listening the Wyld Stallions music, and Keannu Reaves would never have gotten enough spare time to make Speed or The Matrix.
But last I knew, ftp and smtp worked on DOS, Windows, OS/2, Linux, Unix, and who knows what else, without a pile of kludges for backward compatibility.
Standards should be as clear and simple as possible. (and no simpler, though you can never get too much clarity in a standard) Part of the problem happens when things may not have been intended to be a Standard, but became so though wide usage. Another part happens when 'clear and simple' are not only not followed, but are deliberately avoided in order to establish a 'proprietary standard'.
Kinda torques me off, too.
I wish someone would do a decent job of porting the OS/2 WPS to Linux. It was the only gui that was able to keep me away from a command line for any significant amount of time. Most of the time, to do 'real work' I just open an xterm. (or dos prompt, under Windows) Under OS/2, I found I could actually function well under the WPS, though I still had to drop to a command prompt at times.
The WPS took the 'objects' on the screen and truly made them into objects, in the programming sense, rather than make them behave roughly like objects with file and drag/drop associations and the like.
But naaaah, let's chase Windows.
Forget building codes. Problems like you mention are what Neighborhood Thermonuclear Weapons were made for.
Darn. My modpoints expired today. Oh well, maybe my response will help others read your post, and get it some modpoints.
I can agree to use 'signed drivers' to control all hardware in a signal path. I can forsee setting up a 'trusted' section in the kernel, that when in the 'trusted' state, even (the owner) I can't tamper with it, and know that it has its own verifiable integrity mechanisms.
As for ripping chips and getting keys, I've had some indirect contact with people who do crypto chips, and those things are awfully tamper-resistant. Whether a tamper-resistant chip is cheap enough to mass market is another question. But it's really like a very good lock on a door. An ordinary lock is meant to be secure against most people. A really good lock may conceivably fall only to government spooks.
That's why I talked about 'trust grant' later in the post. If I don't own the keys, I don't want DRM. But if I do own the keys, I'm willing to temporarily surrender some control in order to allow someone else to trust me enough to deliver content.
This then becomes an intersection of trust sets: I trust them a certain amount, and no more, and they trust me a certain amount, an no more. Hopefully the intersection of those two trust sets has sufficient capabilities to play DVDs and music.
But in order to be truly useful, entering into the 'trust grant' shouldn't render the box useless for multitasking on other things, and the other party should be tightly confined to their sandbox.
Naaaah, we'll get DRM shoved down our throats, the owners won't be trusted, and everyone (media and software companies, government, and crackers) will have access to our boxes except the owners.
This is the key that keeps getting lost.
There is some discussion of TCPA from some guy from IBM, insisting that it isn't all bad, *as long as the user retains control*. What we all really fear about "Trusted Computing" is that WE (the computer owner/user) are the ones who are *not* trusted.
The real pain in all of this is that there is some good in Trusted Computing, if done properly. Unfortunately things are polarizing into two camps, corporations using DRM to protect THEIR property against their customers, and NO DRM AT ALL. Trusted Computing done properly is lost in the shuffle, but if I had to pick one of the other two, I'd take no DRM at all.
I suspect that what we *REALLY* need is some sort of 'grant trust' relationship. The computer trusts ME, but I give it a 'grant trust' to Pixar so I can watch one of their movies, and give them some reason to trust me. But at the same time, I never surrender control of my machine, just agree not to do certain things while the 'grant trust' is active.
Oh, well.