No, not exactly. The US government would be the only organization affected by such a law (you DID read the summary, right?) and they are by far not the only paying user of computer software - and have not been for decades. Duh.
How often do we hear Microsoft complain about all hte money they lost when the US Army upgraded to Macintosh for their systems? Never. In fact, they're doing just fine.
OTOH, free software is known for being very reliable, and much of the proprietary stuff is known for being problematic and unstable (Windows in particular - as NASA was just reminded). How much money is lost trying to work around the bugs in proprietary solutions that often take months for the authors to find and hammer out, where OSS bugs can usually be fixed in days with equal or less effort? Quite a bit - just getting M$ to answer a phone call for help requires you to send presidents Grant and Lincoln over on a one-way ticket.
Before I get flamed for that paragraph, I only used M$ as an example - they're not the only one, not by a long shot. They just happen to be the most prominent, and the easiest target.:D
There would be no "economic slump." A slump would requre mass abandonment of a wide variety of software titles, on a scale that goes far beyond the number of licenses that the US Govt. actually owns. Therefore, their doing so would cause only minimal damage to the software industry, and the amount of tax spending removed by this would mean that, at least under the GWB administration, all of the top 1% of the country would save enough money to buy a new car every two years after tax cuts. Since taxes are a continuous drain on the economy in any shape or form, the reduction in taxes (if there is one, with GWB in office you can never expect logic to prevail) that this could cause would if anything improve the economy more than harm it. Don't forget, the savings would be passed on to software developers as well - they still might lose some money, but the blow would be softened (not that it'd be hard in the first place.)
Don't think of Netscape and Mozilla as one and the same - Mozilla is far faster and more stable, NS6 is in desperate need of an update to the newer Mozilla codebase. Dont even look at Netscape 4.x, Mozilla 0.7 and newer simply blow it away, and Mozilla 0.81 is, IMO, the best browser out there riht now (IE doesn't even touch it) and no version of Netscape can be compared to it. BTW, if you use GNOME and Nautilus (I don't yet, but I've heard plenty about it) you get Gecko (the Mozilla/NS6 rendering engine) integration, which is on par with MSHTML integration in Windows (Its not IE being integrated, it's IE's HTML libraries being used as part of the shell, so in other words it's the same concept.) HTML integration is spreading like wildfire, if you keep up to date and use the major desktops on Linux (or just use the default shell in Windows) there's no way you can have an x86 box and not have HTML integrated into your desktop with a common OS.
Heh, my family thought Yahoo was a porn site at first, because we originally discovered it during an extremely inexperienced search for pr0n. It became one of the family's longest-running tech-jokes. Now, it gets an extra twist. YAHOOO!!!
No, you left something out. It won't be the norm until Linux has desktop marketshare at least in the same league as Windows (which it currently doesn't), the exact same can be said for the mac. IF EVER is not something that should be used, btw. Companies will always prioritize shipping date of it's windows version over releasing a Linux/Mac/WIndows game all at once, for as long as Windows has the tremendous marketshare difference that it does. Consider that there are very, very few desktop computers (read: not servers) out there that have Linux and don't also have a version of Windows, and that Linux video card support is pitiful unless you have at least a 3DFX, Matrox, or nvidia card, and even then only the nvidia cards are supported WELL. It won't happen soon - there are still a number of issues to work out - but to say that it won't happen for years, or ever, in an industry as radically dynamic as this is sheer ignorance. Keep in mind that Linux's marketshare continues to soar, it continues to become easier and easier to setup, configure, and use (not as much as Windows or Mac, but it is improving, and at a considerable rate) and that it is, technologically, able to handle anything that Windows can (often better) and it is not too hard to believe that it will become a major contendor. If anything has the potential, it's Linux. Keep in mind, we will soon have a linux game console, we already have a number of Linux appliances, and the PS2 may someday run Linux (it's more about boardroom politics than technology, Sony has already written a port) and in an effort to fight fire with fire with M$, if Sony uses Linux and the Indrema becomes a contendor, Nintendo just might follow suit as well to keep M$'s influence to a minimum. (Letting people use a similar framework for every major system that's not M$ would be a great way to keep them from gaining dominance (especially since the X-Box itself will likely be able to run Linux in very little time, seeing as the platform is mostly pre-existing, extremely well-supported hardware), which should be priority #1 for Sony and Nintendo, since having M$ gain enough momentum to be able to throw its weight around successfully would cause severe damage to both companies. This is all pure speculation. Salt to taste.) Think about it - Linux as a major game platform is not at all hard to believe.
These were created for the following reason:
They actually do allow you to set up a number of applications in less time than if you program, without the hassles of debugging and with much less know-how. Once you know your way around Hypercard and the "easy languages" well enough, they can enable this. Usually. However, if you have a good, working knowledge of more advanced solutions you may find them to be more efficient - of course, there's always the learning curve involved in getting to that point (the single largest barrier) and also the extra work incurred with more complex projects - particularly debugging. And God help you if you try to do a large project in Assembler in a hurry... then again, that's what C, C++, Java, SQL, Perl (Yes, I know Perl is a scripting language, but it is more than obfuscated enough to avoid the "made for idiots" label - and the only one of the previous list who's code I can't easily read) and other such languages are for, along with the associated libraries and APIs that make your life easier.
Now, if you're going to gripe, (not saying you are) gripe at the school for not knowing any better and not even teaching you programming. (HTML, and nearly all scripting languages (especially VB) do not qualify as programming IMO) That course sounds more like an introduction to basic content creation / problem solving using computer technology, while real programming involves the use of computer science, logic, and a host of other concepts that will likely never (fully) become involved in Hypercard and HTML. Or many scripting languages.
I challenge you, however, to program a database with even limited animation in assembler faster than I can do so in Filemaker or some random Java IDE with SQL backend support (may not even be necessary with vectors and hash tables, depends on the project), while taking frequent coke breaks. Hell, I'll do a beer-run to give you a head-start. These things are designed to make you do as little as possible to get something done, by doing all the dirty work for you. If you use Assembler for anything other than scientific applications, compiler design, or OS design, you're out of your fscking mind... it's just too much work to tell it every little thing it has to do when you can just spit a few lines in a high-level language or use a visual tool to get the same job done.
Exactly. No one has innovated recently because no one has had to rack their brains for ideas on how to get the hell out of whatever shithole the economy or politicians have left them in.
Ummm.. Move everything from old dirs to new dirs, then do a
ln -s/usr/share/doc/usr/doc & ln -s/usr/share/dict/words/usr/dict/words
And get on with your life
They should offer options to do things like this in the install and configuration tools, though. Would probably help if distros just did stuff like this a lot, such as fixing the confusion between modules.conf and conf.modules.
Of course, the Constitution is not all powerful. It's power is limited only to branches of government that feel like honoring it, apart from that, it's up to the whim of the entity involved. Why? LAWYERS. Even the Supreme Court has limited ability, branching from its inability to enforce certain types of judgements (it's not remotely recent, but the "trail of tears" comes to mind. They ruled against Jackson, so he just goes ahead and does what he wanted to do in the first place, and nobody could do a damn thing about it - leading to one of the greatest injustices of this country's history. Why? Because the Supreme court itself had no power to enforce.)
Here's another example: You can sign away your rights to free speech. The Disney-owned town of Celebration, about five-minutes-to-two-hours away from me depending on the time of day and volume of Disney-bound tourists present, requires all residents to do this in order to buy a house. This isn't the only ridiculous restriction placed on residents, there are others such as Disney retaining ownership of land and town approval being required for any changes to the exterior of a home that are more than subtle. Anyway, if you purchase a house in Celebration, you are legally tongue-tied. Say anything negative about Celebration, Disney, Celebratin School (of which I am a graduate) or whatever - and have them find out - and they 0wNz j00.
And then there's companies forcing online services to divulge users' personal information so that said users can be sued for bad-mouthing the plaintiff, breaking the DMCA, or whatever.
Other examples include gun control, the DMCA, and the very existence of the FCC. Not to mention, restriction on right to assemble (people have been arrested for assembling without flying an American flag. Don't ask me where the legal grounds on this are, but the judge ruled that as long as a flag flies, a person can say whatever they want. I don't think that case was appealed, I only heard of it second hand many, many years ago and don't have any details.)
I don't understand why Congress doesn't just go ahead and repeal about half of the Constitution in the first place. Guns, free speech, non-self-incrimination (the very use of which is considered incriminating in many cases - again, F*CKING LAWYERS), anything to do with minority rights, the list goes on and on. It's mostly just f*k1ng useless.
They'd better allow for the user to alter the speed in software. Maybe a dedicated software interface, that showed the intended speed and a disclaimer, and that could be set to different speeds in different modes (say, 100mhz-equivalent up until boot sector load) for safety purposes. I do see potential for the CPU and FSB not being tied so closely in speed, though I have to wonder about latency.
I see tremendous potential for this to be used to alter speed depending on the task, without disturbing other components.
For example, an OS could raise or lower the speed of the CPU and memory and other such components dynamically depending on usage, and act like it still has full speed, so that if you're only running an MP3 player that takes 5% system resources, the processor only runs at 10% or so of its normal capacity rather than being told to chill 95 out of every 100 cycles and running at full capacity. This can save mobile users a ton of power (bye bye speedstep) and trouble and also save power and heat for desktop users, who are finding power and cooling costs increasingly high over time. Not to mention, the prospect of temporarily increasing the speed of a CPU to deal with bursty system usage is nice as well, given temp monitoring facilities.
Ideally, in my opinion, the CPU should run as fast as it safely can given its current running temperature, and slow down as the OS tells it to do so or by intelligently metering HLT calls and lowering its speed as appropriate until it gets few HLTs. This would be an optimal setup, but is only possible with a CPU that allows for arbitrary speed changes. Multiplier-locked CPUs on a bus that likes to be left alone is not going to cut it, and for that matter neither will an unlocked CPU that only adjusts in increments of.5 times the bus speed and cannot do so reliably.
I know that gota little off topic, but I see some serious potential for this aside from the theoretical speed increase. Just my $.02.
CD players just dumbly play what's on the disc. I could see some form of encryption using a weak serial-number-for-a-key system or something along those lines, but a CD player will see the data the exact same way on either a pressed or burned CD and simply won't care. If you do a simple raw copy, you're all set. Simple as that. Nero is great for this, as is Adaptec and I hear CloneCD, and on the *nix side a plain old dd to iso image should suffice.
If this technology works by screwing with the bytes so that they can't be normally read and relies on the player not to choke, then instead you can do the opposite - using a cd proggy that just reads and records, errors and all, faithfully, so that the copy looks identical to the way that the CD player sees it to begin with. I know Nero can do this, but that's as far as my limited knowledge reaches. This is essentially the digital equivalent of the good-old line-out to line-in hack. Or, you could do just that, you'd probably sacrifice quality but with the right equipment you just might be able to pull off a static-free, near-perfect copy using spdif on seperate sound cards, while playing the original CD digitally (win2k can do this with any drive that supports DAE.) I personally have both a SB Live! MP3+ and a Aureal SQ2500 (I happened to win the SB in a random drawing contest, the aureal card was my choice at first. I'm still undecided, I now use the SB for multimedia and the Aureal for games.) and I think I can get the Aureal to output in digital to the SPDIF input on the SB Live! barring issues with clock synchronization (though it may just be a resampling issue, which would mean a few CPU cycles but near-perfect quality.) Someday, when I feel gutsy and crazy enough to splice together an audio cable and a 9mm headphone plug, I'm going to try this.
I have to wonder what effect my SMP setup would have... Maybe I should boot into Linux instead and patch the kernel for low latency...
I do know one thing - if it does work, there wouldn't be an audible difference on all but the best audio systems provided sampling rates stay up. Maybe this would be better done on two seperate computers considering latency and multithreading, perhaps the recorder is best run under DOS or single-user Linux mode. Well, we'll see.
"I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good."
Personally, I doubt this would happen - much. If they break compatibility, they have a seperate format. An incompatible format. Any changed made to Vorbis that they would want to use would necessitate a painstaking update to their own format, which may or may not break compatibility with the original broken format. It can become a complicated mess. Otherwise, a company that breaks compatibility would be on its own. In short, it pays to send a number of significant changes back to Vorbis unless they maintain full compatibility and can be easily re-ported. If a company is willing to go through this amount of trouble to make their own format, let them - they may as well be another Microsoft or RealNetworks, and they probably won't be able to generate sufficient steam on their own.
OTOH, I'm all for proprietary (or free, whatever the case may be) extensions that count as "bells & whistles," the little incentives for using one program over another but that still allow you to switch back and forth or use platforms where a given program doesn't exist. Creativity, innovation, and diversity of ideas in software development is something that should be valued, cherished, and encouraged above all else. I don't want to prove Jim Allchin right, but part of the whole reason for OSS is to keep "new blood" thriving. BSD helps to stimulate that more than GPL because of its allowances of proprietary use. In this case, it's a good thing. It isn't always, sometimes we're better off with GPL - it depends more on the individual case. However, in cases where there is incentive to keep all the core stuff open, and maintain full compatibility, even when the license doesn't require it, such as there is here, we may as well be using BSD.
Many of Creative's modems have "MP3 COMPATIBLE" on the box in the corner... Guess that means that you have to have one of their modems (and one of the mp3 compatible ones at that) in order to download the mp3s "correctly." The only thing more ridiculous than that is that people probably believe it, and would choose it over other modems because they don't claim to have MP3 compatibility.
A side note, Creative has a model of the SBLive called the Live! MP3 and now the MP3+5.1, but since these are made with amateur music playback, recording, and manipulation in mind and come with a veritable shiotload of software that does so, I can't gripe as much. Basically, it's just like the other "SBLive Value" clones, whereas the only differentiating factor is the software bundle.
I actually won one of those at a drawing at my college, and I'm still trying to decide whether to switch over to it completely or stick with my good ol' Aureal Sq2500. In the meantime, they seem to play nice together, except for DOS emulation in Windows 9x...
The only problem with the island is the male/female ratio. There's what, four guy geeks to every girl geek? Besides, there's the hygiene concern - too many geeks go for too long without showers and use too little deoderant anyway.
Of course, the benefits of fiber-optic lines coming to everyone's house delivering speeds of over 1000 MB/S are hard to ignore....
Maybe we should all just move to Antarctica. I'm sure we cold easily clear off the snow from one of the more desloate regions (there isn't much stuff living there anyway), create a huge habitat, perhaps underground to conserve heat, with Penguin observatories poking up to observe some of the coolest (no pun intended) creatures on the face of the planet.
For energy, geothermal technology combined with solar power (six months on, six months off - could be worse) and massive batteries and perhaps large-scale distributed hydroelectric power harnessing ocean currents should suffice. To supplement heat, we's just duct off the exhaust from everyone's computers and cut down on the noise at the same time. Everyone would be encouraged to keep their computers running all the time, and there would be some kick-ass clusters set up running off of idle time. For solid fuels when absolutely necessary, mis-burned CDRs and Microsoft product's repsective packages will be imported and burned. So will Microsoft execs. We can make a sort of "biodome" inside to supply us with food and other natural resources. Dedicated lines to Russia, the most free country left standing.
Or, maybe a floating habitat kept in the Gulf of Mexico that moved to avoid hurricanes would work. All the solar power you'd ever need, nice weather, endless supply of water. The possibilities are endless.
Who knows, maybe we could even convert and build off of some oil rigs in the middle of nowhere.
What the heck, I thought I'd try to throw together a sample IP Agreement that both a company and an employee would find agreeable. It attempts to keep a company's IP and an individual's IP seperate, and offer rules for sharing, conflict, contamination, and the resulting consequences. IANAL, and all that. I don't suggest anyone actually try to USE this without putting it past a (damn good) lawyer first, regardless of which side you're on.
Remember, it tries to be as fair as possible to all involved parties. Of course, screw up and it does little to protect you, regardeless of which side you're on.
IP Agreement
During the course of your employment at [company] you may, while not on company time or with the use or assistance of company property, freely invent and develop any projects you wish provided there is no conflict of interest between your product and any product being developed or sold by [company] without sanctions by the board. Any products that coincide with, but do not conflict with, any products being sold or developed are exempt and may be encouraged, with the restriction that they do not assist in violation of any end-user license agreement, offer functionality intended for future or enhanced versions of a product, or in any way hinder the ability of [company] to profit from its own IP. Any product you develop that is not affected by these restrictions is your own, and you may (or may not), at your discretion, license it or otherwise restricted information about it (restricted information is defined herein as information not normally available to the general public, including customers and non-customers alike, without some form of restriction. Any and all restrictoins apply, including information or product protected by licenses such as GPL or BSD or copyrighted or patented information or product) to [company] under any licensing scheme you choose without fear of ramification or reprisal from [company], and at the same time you may expect no preferential treatment by [company] outside of approved sanctions contained in the said license. Any licenses must be approved by a manager of higher company rank, and all licences will be treated as though given by an outside entity. For the purposes of licensing, you are considered a wholly seperate entity and your licensing and employment will be considered coincidental and unrelated unless there is a change of conditions as described herein. Termination of employment and termination of license are seperate. In addition, to use any product or ideas developed by any employee (including yourself) during company time or with the use or assistance of company property, which is consiered [company]'s IP, or any otherwise restricted information (again, defined as information not normally available to the general public, including both customers and non-customers, without some form of restriction) for any personal projects will require a license, which may (or may not) be provided at the discretion of [company], under the same basic rules applied to your own personal IP. Again, for licensing purposes, you are considered a seperate entity, termination of license and termination of employment are kept seperate, and any change of conditions as described herein may alter or nullify the license.
The use of any of [company]'s IP in a personal project, or the use of your own personal IP in a company project, will be considered contamination, and you will either remove portions of the product that contain conflicting IP, alter the product in order to eliminate contamination, revert the project to the state it was in before contamination, form a valid license, or surrendur all involved IP that is your own to the company to be consequently considered its own IP, or face legal ramifications and termination at the discretion of your supervisor and/or [company]. While you may make these choice freely for your own work, company work is to be handled at the discretion of [company]. You will, however, be given the choice to license or surrendur the IP and none of your own personal IP will be taken from you without choice or negotiation. Any license or surrendur must be made with your full consent as well as [company]'s, however, [company] may, at its discretion, consider this grounds for dismissal, consider legal ramifications, surrendur its own IP to you, order you to remove your involved IP under supervision, revert the project to its previous, uncontaminated state, or remove your IP at its discretion without your involvement. You may, at [company]'s discretion, be considered financially responsible for decontamination and be docked pay for the time spent decontaminating company projects.
Note that personal projects and property are defined as any work or development done outside of company time, without the use or assistance of company property. All work or developent done on company time or with the use or assistance of company property is considered company property outside of special sanctions that may be granted by [company].
Well, that's it for now. I know it needs a lot of refinement, but I guess if anyone's interested this could be useful for something or someone. I think there should be some kind of GPL IP agreement set up (there may be one FAIK) to allow someone like an open-source developer or whatever to work on proprietary projects, this more or less accomplishes that. I'm getting kind of burnt out, and am short on time to put into this, I'm sure I'm missing something but for the life of me, I have no idea what.
Actually, now that I think of it, here's some issues:
1. Company uses your IP without your permission (think GPL for example) or without following a set license
2. Other employee uses your IP in a company project without permission
3. You use other employee's IP without permission
4. More consideration of use of free tools owned by either side, or open-source by either side, etc. both restrictions and the the lack thereof should be considered. Obviously, no need for restrictions for use of GPL'd code as long as GPL is not violated, etc.
"OTOH, the employer can't ban you from making competing products/solutions after you've quit our job with them. Then you should be a free man, free to earn money on your expertise."
Funny - I hear M$ does just that. They have been known to sue competitors for hiring former M$ employees since they have that kind of clause in the contract, and if they enter a new market, which they do CONSTANTLY, they immediately have the option of suing damn near every major competitor in the said market over this (remember, M$ is a huge company and is not without a proportionate turnover rate) even if they employed said workers well before M$ even considered entering the given market, or began work on development for projects in that market. Screwed up? Yes. Lawful? Probably. Ethical? Hell no.
At any rate, this is a problem rampant throughout the industry, affecting everyone from code pimps to humongous corporations.
Personally, I think we need some kind of laws that prevent these things, by restricting just how restricting an IP agreement can be and preventing or minimizing the effects of competing work clauses (or whatever they're called, IANAL) and the like. As long as there is no conflict of interest between an employee and a company, I feel that the individual should always have full rights to his/her code and the option to license it to the company at his/her discretion, with no fear of reprisal or any preferential treatment compared to other employees, whatever the case may be. In addition, I feel that as long as there are reasonable (minimal) restrictions covering trade secrets, a departing employee should have full freedom upon leaving a company to work wherever and on whatever he/she chooses. Basically, that's all that corporations really care about anyway, the protection of their own IP that they spend money on - and I feel that it is only reasonable to ask an employee to respect that, provided the employer shows the same respect for the employee's work.
If I had the time, I'd drop into legalese mode and try my hand at throwing together an IP agreement that could be considered fair and reasonable to all parties involved (maybe there should be a GNU IP agreement for use in developing proprietary technology? Sounds ironic, but there is definitely a need...)
Heck, I'll just go ahead and do it. I'll start a new thread.
Too bad that there seems to be no hope for MS pulling their heads out of their rears. I hope no one actually believes that they are trying to protect their rights to innovate - they don't actually have the need for that in the first place, since they rarely, if ever innovate - but are actually trying to protect their rights to plaigariaze. Can you say hypocrytical? That, and they're trying to place a legal roadblock in front of anyone trying to speed up and take away marketshare from them.
MS, when I see you build a better product than Linux, I'll believe it. The only time I can get Linux to crash (I have tried) is by trying to use the beyond-buggy, unsupported, proprietary drivers for my Aureal sound card in Linux (kernel modules) or by doing an intentional local DoS exploit involving the use of too many processes. I can crash Windows 2000, however, using my Aureal-based sound card drivers (actually work usually, but still are unsupported (not just since Aureal went under, same for the Linux ones, btw) and occasionally bluescreen), doing a local DoS, running certain applications, and just plain using the system. I experience two to three crashes a day in Win2K, and NONE in Linux unless I do something really, really, really stupid. I can't even explain most of my Win2K crashes.
It seems that with the DMCA, MS's new restrictions on media in Windows XP, and their desire to see OSS outlawed (I was actually going to say in a post sometime soon that if MS could have their way, they'd probably outlaw open source ASAP.. Looks like Jim Allchin has beaten me to the punch by implying that they would), the ability of the DMCA to be leveraged to completely eliminate Fair Use and circumvent the First Ammendment in order to favor corporations over consumers, and the FCC banning consumer use of technologies like HDTV other than for viewing purposes, that if things continue to go along this path, than this country just might fill the gap left in the Communist ideal when the USSR collapsed.
Except this time, it's for the sake of corporations rather than the government (but lately, the distinction has become less and less prevalent..)
I can see it now:
I pledge allegiance, to the very existence, of the Great Corporations Of America, and to the stockholders for which they stand, no tolerance, under Gates, uncircumventable, with invoices and subpeonas for all.
Don't even get me started on patents.
It seems that legislators are finally getting the right idea. The question is whether or not they will follow through and reform the current mess that is IP law.
I sent this in. Here's my comments, for your viewing pleasure. Warning: This is LONG.
In regards to public filters, my suggestions:
1. Allow libraries to choose their own filter products.
2. Suggest or require that libraries use filtering products whose parent company discloses what criteria is used when blocking or allowing a site (many don't) since many sites may be blocked for often poor reasons, sometimes even on a whim, or if they go against an individual's beliefs or agenda (even if the sites are not in any way profane or could be considered dangerous.) Here's a few articles of interest:
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/12/08/0238239.shtml about a decrypted filtering list used by SmartFilter, which found a number of sites obviously mis-rated. As with everything else on Slashdot, there are a number of interesting comments appended to this article.
http://dfn.org/focus/censor/contest.htm A contest, apparently to find the most ridiculous examples of filtering - such as a high school student that couldn't access his own high school's web page from its own library since the filter automatically blocked the word "high" from domain names. The runner up, Hillary Anne, tried to register her email address at Hotmail as hillaryanne@hotmail.com but the filtering software spotted the word "aryan" hidden in her name... A number of other examples exist here, too. Richard "Dick" Armey's Web site is blocked by Netnanny, Surfwatch, Cybersitter, N2H2, and Wisechoice, the very same filters he promotes - because his site contains the word "dick." And, this excerpt from the article:
The conservative group Focus on the Family intends its anti-porn site Pure Intimacy to be a "resource for those struggling with sexual temptations" and the "psychological bondage" that is "a major reason why individuals go online." Jim K. observed that Cybersitter blocked this site for violating the following categories: porno, hardcoreporno, sexual, nudity, and, of course, bondage.
I could go on and on, but just visit that contest site - it does.
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/03/09/133243.shtml about Symantec's I-Gear software and a hack that revealed its true nature - reporting user information back to Symantec and blocking - unnecessarily - a number of.edu sites for no real reason.
About I-Gear, the high school I graduated from - Celebration - used it, but only for monitoring, since they believed it to be too unreliable and preferred to go after students that continued to visit sites that they themselves could deem inappropriate. They could check for sites that were inappropriate, some of which the filtering software would miss, and would be able to ignore sites that weren't really inappropriate at all but were otherwise blocked by the software anyway. I only know of one site that was blocked, which was a message board for people complaining about the town of Celebration, which has a policy that forbids anyone living there from practicing their first-ammendment rights (they sign them away.) involving negative comments about the town. Whether the site was blocked because of over-use or if it was blocked for more political reasons is unknown to me. I also do not know if they continue this more involved practice of checking the records themselves.
Having read the article on the contest, however, I really can't say I blame them!
4. Take steps to protect privacy. Notably, Mattell's filter software (cybernanny, I believe, but I'm not sure) has been accused of spying on the user. A good idea would be banning any software that reports back to the filtering software company. This information is often sold for profit, for uses like targeted advertising or for "spamming."
5. Allow institutions to selectively add or remove individual sites. Given the above information, I feel that this is more than reasonable. Researching Fibonacci's sequence tripped up one filter, for example - so much for a student's math homework.
6. Please endorse free and open source solutions. An open product would allow for anyone to suggest that a site be added or removed because of its content, and allows for a debate over sites that otherwise could be blocked or allowed on a whim. In the case of open software, a library could be instead required to go through the developer for a change to be made (improving the integrity of the filters). In addition, allowing for different "levels" of filtering might be desired - allowing for different levels of appropriateness similar to movie ratings. For example, while no minor should access pornography, "adult language" isn't really a problem for 16-year-old students (anyone who's ridden on the back of a school bus can vouch that most elementary school students don't have much trouble with it either, but that's another story.). As an added benefit, they're free, and libraries, schools, and the like could use the money. Unfortunately, however, I know of no open-source filters at this time (much of the tech community is anti-filter anyway, since they disagree with cencorship of all but the most objectionable content.)
7. Allowing users to gain higher levels of access in order to be able to find more diverse material upon proving age is probably a good idea. In middle school, my required reading occasionally had some amount of profanity, which nearly all filters would immediately modify or block. Filters would also block a number of perfectly legitimate phrases. Saying "I'll just be in and out of the store really quick" would be blocked by any filter that watches for the phrase "in and out" (and I'm sure that there's a filter out there that does, or will.) The upside to this is that a number of areas of interest could be blocked to younger users, such as a study on homosexuality that, while perfectly fine for an older teenager or adult to read, may not be read by children if their parents would prefer they didn't. In addition, allowing parents to selectively add and remove restrictions on various areas of interest that could be considered "gray areas" would be good. While it's fairly obvious that pornography, bomb-making recipies, marijuana growing tips, and the like should be blocked, a number of areas such as human anatomy, homosexuality, religion, and discussions or even readings of banned books (Catcher In The Rye, for example, which many schools and libraries still censor but some embrace as a literary masterpiece) and research reports on the aforementioned topics could be considered "gray areas" that some ages could be allowed or denied access to, and that parents could control more. Allowing a filter software provider of full control over what users can see, and deeming everything to be either bad or good (as is done now) is, obviously, less than desirable. Personally, I don't see what a political campaign and hardcore bestiality have in common, but may programs will block both at once and don't discriminate. Since there is no clear-cut means of deciding what to block, etc., allowing for more flexibility is ideal.
Personally, I think a standard should be defined for filtering software:
1. NO reporting back to ANYONE other than local administrators on what users have been doing. Privacy should be protected and only necessary exceptions to that should be allowed. Corporations have no business knowing what a child does online. However, the local administrator and certain individuals (parents, perhaps teachers, etc.) should be able to review logs of what a user does (and all usage should be logged! This offers recourse in the event that a site that is inappropriate, but not yet blocked, is visited.) No one that has no business in knowing should be able to review an individual's usage of computer resources.
2. Material should be broken down into different "categories" by their topic and the objectionability of each, and a separate standard should be set for which categories are to be blocked to all users, which should be blocked to older teens, to younger teens, etc. and unless unlocked by an authorized operator (eg. A librarian) the software will assume that the user on the given station is a toddler, or a member of the most restricted group.
3. Aside from mandatory blockings (such as porn) that are simply blocked, period, parents and local administrators should be able to define restrictions for the aforementioned "gray areas," topics that may or may not be objectionable to some. While administrators would be able to specify general restrictions by user groups, parents would have the option to selectively modify their individual child's restrictions (aside, of course, from the mandatory blocks such as bona fide pornography.) A standard should be set for what gray areas will and won't be blocked, that should be enabled by default on all software, but that is modifiable by the local administrator.
4. Administrators should be able to selectively alter site lists. As demonstrated by the previous examples, a local administrator really is no less trustworthy of what should be blocked and allowed than the software developers, so as long as site visiting is logged, there should be no problem.
5. Word and phrase filters should be avoided, and only the most extreme examples used. For example: "sex" should not be blocked as the word is often used for gender and appears accidentally within a number of phrases, "cum" appears, among other places, in the word cucumber, "breast" would prevent discussion of breast cancer (America Online once inadvertently did this).
Government-produced, multi-platform software is likely a plus for this. Since this will cost a great deal of money for each institution to set up, avoiding for-pay services will be a tremendous benefit.
I would suggest finding and endorsing an open-source effort for creating filtering software and push to see the above features implemented, or for the government to spearhead an effort itself. A number of programmers would become involved for the opportunity to protect their children/nieces/nephews/neighbors and still minimize censorship that is simple unnecessary. An open source model, under government supervision and control, would enable tremendous security and quality and minimize potential for abuse, while allowing for an amazingly rapid exposure rate for newly-appearing sites.
At any rate, I would appreciate a reply on this. This hits close to home for nearly all Internet users, especially the more technologically-inclined like myself. The simple fact is, currently available solutions simply are not ready for public use and are very much unrefined, and a fair implementation is impossible.
This is really the best for someone who needs a laptop's functionality and power but also needs to be able to take notes without the limitations of a cropped-down QWERTY keyboard (ie. college students, especially in math and comsci classes) I'd like to see good flowchart and composite software. What would be really sweet would be a program that tried to translate into ASCII as you went along, but kept undecipherable letters in their original bitmapped form along with apparent mispellings or misstrokes (kind of how Adobe Acrobat does OCR - it translates what it can, and simply includes what it can't.) and also allow for drawings, diagrams, etc.
This would be perfect for me (PDAs, particularly palmtops, have size and flexibility limitations for doing serious work) to use, if only it were cheaper. I'd buy it for $2000, but as always, laptops must be overpriced. I'd also like a (much) bigger screen, but that's asking for a little much.
Above all, use the 2.4 kernel whenever posssible if you do SMP. The 2.4 kernel shows noticable improvement over 2.2 even on a 2-processor machine, and while optimized for 8 or less processors, has been reported to run on 64 processors (though I can't remember just who did this, might have been Linux Care but I really doubt this). It doesn't have NUMA yet, though this will probably be the next major change to Linux the way things are looking now. At any rate, just stick to 2.4 if you do use SMP. It scales far beyond its predecessor, to an extreme. Just review the list of changes and you'll see what I mean. (Gawd, I'd love to see some 'Mindcraft' benchmarks now!)
Also, check your drivers for SMP compatibility, some are better than others and have reputations for it. On the extremely rare occasions that you can get a manufacturer-supplied driver, you should be ok if it's hardware meant for big boxes like this.
Lastly, don't forget clusters. (warning: a long rant on clustering follows, if you aren't interested, this is the time to hit 'Back')
Linux is probably the ideal solution for clusters because of its efficiency and reliability, and the fact it hoses just about everything that is benchmarked against it on lower-end (ie. two processors or less) machines. If you have a lot of clients on the network that perform mundane tasks (ie. word processing, most spreadsheets, etc. that don't fully utilize system resources), utilizing idle cycles ala SETI@Home, combined with a network renovation to 100TX or better (not very expensive these days, but you'd want to eliminate the use of hubs for any machines involved, since bandwidth is at a premium) could yield a lot of horsepower that, at the very least, could supplement your big box (especially in the off hours provided the computers are left on). The money invested in this may give you more bang for the buck than buying new equipment, and if you want to do clustering smaller machines instead of one big box, you can use the remaining money to buy a set of dedicated machines and string them together on gigabit fiber-optic or something, and then bridge them to the rest of the network. x86 machines are great for clustering, PPC is a little overpriced for the power it gives you in many standard configurations(especially compared to Athlon processors if you do floating-point-intensive stuff) unless you use Apple's Altivec, where PPC tends to kick butt, and as for SPARC, ALPHA, MIPS, and anything I forgot to list here, you're on your own since I've never fooled with any of these. If you want to cluster, I'd stick to whatever the rest of the network uses so you only have to code for one processor.
Part of that slowness that many users complain about is bottlenecks that not all people have and the design of the code itself (read some of the previous replies). Lately I have started using Jipe for an IDE, a nice eficient IDE that, under IBM's Windows NT 3.0 JVM with a JIT, feels just as fast as Notepad (just takes a few seconds to load, that's the price you pay for using a JIT.) I don't remember exactly where to get Jipe and it is still a beta release, but the functionality we all care about is there and works well. It's GPL, btw.
On the other hand, when I tried using Forte under Mandrake Linux 7.1 with a heavily optimized kernel and using SMP at that, it was a little slow to respond. This could be attributed to the crappy XFree86 3.xx Savage 2000 drivers, or to bloat code, or even to the fact that this was the first full release of IBM Java 3 for Linux. You be the judge.
Java Workshop, however, where I used to do all of my programming (and is buggy and bloated as hell) looked and felt just like a native app under both Solaris and Windows, and even ran on my 486 (though, it didn't run well at all.)
I should probably point out, though, that IBM's JVM has been shown the overall fastest and most efficient on any platform, and runs nicely on Linux. Even on my heavily optimized and overclocked system, it ran without a hitch on Linux.
Just out of curiosity, what native compilers are there that can be used free of charge (OSS is always nice but free will never draw complaints) and will allow me to produce binaries for at least Linux and Windows? A common issue is distribution, if you want to have users download a program, they won't want to download a newer JRE to run it and slower systems (Pre-Celeron) may have performance issues that would be absent in native apps.
Hmm... I'd say that in terms of raw capability, a PC that was high-end a year ago (read: 500+mhz and a GeForce) should be able to at least match a PS2 in games (though I'd but anything better than a cacheless Celeron as better for non-gaming applications.) The thing is, a PS2 doesn't have to display at a screen resolution any higher than 800X600, where many gamers play their games at 1024X768 resolution or higher (depends, though.) A lot of it is software, however. Games can be better optimized for a console than a PC, since the console allows for direct hardware access while a PC (since there isn't a set standard for communicating with the incredible diversity of video cards, sound cards, processors, etc. out there) has its games programmed (usually) to use on of three APIs: OpenGL (Best performance and compatibility overall for most uses but only covers graphics), DirectX (M$ only, typically a tad slower than OpenGL but supposedly easier to develop with, and also covers sound and has better 2d features, but tends to have lower-quality drivers especially from ATI and S3), and GLide (Best performance for 3DFX hardware, and is exclusive to 3DFX hardware. Used to be the standard but now is by far a minority) All three of these APIs depend on drivers written by the hardware manufacturers, and themselves are executed through an operating system. So, PCs have (usually) at least three layers to go through to communicate with hardware, while a console usually will have no more than one.
Also, it is important to note that since the PS2 and other consoles stay at low resolutions, they are optimized as such while video cards are designed to support a wider range of resolutions.
I firmly believe, however, that any reasonable fast computer (above 500mhz with a FSB of 100 or higher (FSB is important, as it directly affects memory bandwidth - ties in directly to DDR RAM, though Rambus is figured differenly because of higher latency (bad) and fewer bits for clock cycle (also bad)), meaning Pentium 3s, Durons, Athlons, and overclocked Celerons) with at least a GeForce2 MX will beat a PS2 or Dreamcast at the same resolution in Quake3 using the same features and effects, in terms of raw framerate and also quality. Keep in mind, Quake3's engine is used as the basis of a number of new and upcoming console games on the DC and PS2, so if there is not already a port there may be one soon.
Also, computers can use more advanced features sometimes independant of the game's code (thus enhancing games that predate a given feature) such as full hardware anti-aliasing that makes a HUGE difference on flight sims/racing sims for 3DFX cards.
Of course, as games improve support for some other technologies, the expandable and scalable nature of the PC pushes it ahead. Currently, about the only way to enjoy SMP (using two or more processors at once in a computer) is running Quake3 while using a NVidia card (most gamer cards have SMP-incompatible drivers), but this will eventually change. SMP is relied upon heavily in 3D modeling (like that used to design the games that run on the PS2) and for servers, and is known to produce tremendous improvements in compatible games. With the SMP-capable Celerons (they all are, I have two 366s running at 525mhz in my box and they ROCK) and the upcoming SMP support for Durons and Athlons, anyone can build a cheap SMP box that can take on systems much more expensive - and if you are willing to get an expensive box to begin with, just a little more money will make ONE BADASS BOX.
One last thing (this is far too long already): Is the PS2 capable of advanced 3D positional sound with headphones, 2 speakers, 4 speakers, or a 5.1-channel system? My PC is. The soundcards to do this can be found for under $100 easily, the older Aureal Vortex2 (which have a questionable future though are still the home positional audio kings) can be had for as little as $40 or less if you look in the right places and they offer the best positional audio in existence (though Creative's EAX is catching up.) Positional audio in Quake is truly an awesome experience, as long as you remember to dodge the rocket with the mouse and not your torso:)
Sorry, but about the IO limitations: They are a bottleneck, but DDR and Rambus take away a significant portion (which is better is still impossible to gauge since there is still no way to do a true direct comparison. Theoretically, they are similar in real-world performance). AGP is pretty fast, though it could be faster (It's little more than a PCI slot at 66mhz (as opposed to 33) with access to system memory, Apple used an 83mhz PCI slot for video in their G3s which was arguably faster than AGP - but no direct comparison.)
Fat32 ran just fine in 95 (arguably more efficiently than in 98, just like everything else) just not in the first release. I've installed Windows 95 onto fat32 partitions many times before, not using OSR2. As far as hardware support, the only advantage that 98 has is slightly better USB and slightly better IRQ sharing.
The other 95% of what 98 has most people don't want, especially since 90% of what 98 has that 95 doesn't is new bugs. I don't use IE integration and personally don't see any truely useful purpose for it that even remotely justifies the performance and reliabiliy hit. Even on a modern machine, removing IE integration provides a considerable speed increase, and slower machines (especially 100mhz/32MB RAM) show a tremendous benefit.
Personally, I ran 98Lite which gives the core of 98 (slightly more efficient and functional than 95, and lets you install newer M$ software that claims to require newer 98 features) while using the 95 shell. I could read 8G partitions in Windows 95 Explorer, saved 8M hardware RAM (given the horribly inefficient use of memory in Windows 9x, this does make a difference, especially since this never seemed to get swapped). This approach is slightly faster than 95, and hella faster than 98, and usually only crashed when Windows ran out of "system resources" which is purely an annoying architectural limitation in all Windows but NT/2000 that will not improve in the least between machines with 8M and 2G of RAM.
BTW, there were ways to make the original 95 run with FAT32. Of course, if you were comfortable running with two partitions or more, and didn't face severe cluster waste (few people actually did) then you would find much better speed in FAT16. I still use fat16 for everything except my Windows 2000 partition (NTFS) and my dedicated Documents partition (fat32, just for size.) Everything else, including swap partitions, two games partitions, and a windows 98Lite partition (just for running games) are Fat16 for speed. It would be nice if EXT/2 was supported in Windows, since it's faster than anything Windows is capable of using (aside from arguments for journaling, but those have been invalidated by ReiserFS and the upcoming EXT/3).
I know it's a long post, I need to work on brevity. I just get POd by people that actually think that Microsoft has done anything useful since Windows 95 for the mainstream user, not that NT was all that good either (Where Windows 2000 is now, at least under the hood, NT should have been at five years ago. UNIX was there ten years ago.)
All of the extra software features are just like free gravy, you don't pay for it - and if you didn't have them, the architecture would almost certainly allow you to add the functionality. USB is probably to be used for the controllers, probably a good thing as it is both inexpensive and very expandable (as far as standard user input devices like controllers go) allowing for more controllers than you'd ever need to use and other peripherals, like mice, that follow normal standards to be used. In other words, you don't have to shell out money for proprietary devices since it uses normal standards - you may already have the needed extras attached to your computer.
DVD isn't expensive, and it does add the functionality of DVD playback at little to no extra cost. It does allow for much more storage than CDs, however. Consider that Final Fantasy 7, which had so many movie files it ran up three CDs, would not only have fit onto a single DVD but would have loaded faster and could have used industry standard MPEG-2 with almost no extra coding effort, while providing excellent quality and efficient (considering quality and available space) use of disk space.
A lot of the cost for the PS2 comes from the R&D put into the new chip, the low supply, the demand (as it is a new product) and the premium that goes with all things new. Compare a 730 mhz Pentium 3 to a 1 ghz Pentium 3 in price and performance, and you'll see this same trend. You pay more for new stuff simply because it's new and because the manufacturer can charge you for it.
This is a good choice for those who don't have a computer capable of modern games or would like the uncomplication of a console. There is a lot to like about this system, and since we can expect it to sell for less than the X-box, it may do very well. Keep in mind that it will probably be a trivial matter to make Indrema games work on your PC (Same processor, and they have to publish any changes they make to any existing GNU/Linux code), so you just may find yourself rooting for this little console that could.
Once again, the computer stuff is gravy. It's not hurting anything, and if it were a plain-vanilla console with the same standard specs (by standard I mean the standards that modern gamers hold a new console to), and no extras, the capability would still be there. It's nice to have, and for those without good computers or an existing DVD, this is a great choice. Besides, having your multimedia seperate from your computer is a nice feature to have, since it tosses away the added complication of using a computer for simpler functions like MP3 playing.
One other note, though - this does let you use standard ISPs.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not exactly. The US government would be the only organization affected by such a law (you DID read the summary, right?) and they are by far not the only paying user of computer software - and have not been for decades. Duh.
:D
How often do we hear Microsoft complain about all hte money they lost when the US Army upgraded to Macintosh for their systems? Never. In fact, they're doing just fine.
OTOH, free software is known for being very reliable, and much of the proprietary stuff is known for being problematic and unstable (Windows in particular - as NASA was just reminded). How much money is lost trying to work around the bugs in proprietary solutions that often take months for the authors to find and hammer out, where OSS bugs can usually be fixed in days with equal or less effort? Quite a bit - just getting M$ to answer a phone call for help requires you to send presidents Grant and Lincoln over on a one-way ticket.
Before I get flamed for that paragraph, I only used M$ as an example - they're not the only one, not by a long shot. They just happen to be the most prominent, and the easiest target.
There would be no "economic slump." A slump would requre mass abandonment of a wide variety of software titles, on a scale that goes far beyond the number of licenses that the US Govt. actually owns. Therefore, their doing so would cause only minimal damage to the software industry, and the amount of tax spending removed by this would mean that, at least under the GWB administration, all of the top 1% of the country would save enough money to buy a new car every two years after tax cuts. Since taxes are a continuous drain on the economy in any shape or form, the reduction in taxes (if there is one, with GWB in office you can never expect logic to prevail) that this could cause would if anything improve the economy more than harm it. Don't forget, the savings would be passed on to software developers as well - they still might lose some money, but the blow would be softened (not that it'd be hard in the first place.)
Don't think of Netscape and Mozilla as one and the same - Mozilla is far faster and more stable, NS6 is in desperate need of an update to the newer Mozilla codebase. Dont even look at Netscape 4.x, Mozilla 0.7 and newer simply blow it away, and Mozilla 0.81 is, IMO, the best browser out there riht now (IE doesn't even touch it) and no version of Netscape can be compared to it. BTW, if you use GNOME and Nautilus (I don't yet, but I've heard plenty about it) you get Gecko (the Mozilla/NS6 rendering engine) integration, which is on par with MSHTML integration in Windows (Its not IE being integrated, it's IE's HTML libraries being used as part of the shell, so in other words it's the same concept.) HTML integration is spreading like wildfire, if you keep up to date and use the major desktops on Linux (or just use the default shell in Windows) there's no way you can have an x86 box and not have HTML integrated into your desktop with a common OS.
Heh, my family thought Yahoo was a porn site at first, because we originally discovered it during an extremely inexperienced search for pr0n. It became one of the family's longest-running tech-jokes. Now, it gets an extra twist. YAHOOO!!!
No, you left something out. It won't be the norm until Linux has desktop marketshare at least in the same league as Windows (which it currently doesn't), the exact same can be said for the mac. IF EVER is not something that should be used, btw. Companies will always prioritize shipping date of it's windows version over releasing a Linux/Mac/WIndows game all at once, for as long as Windows has the tremendous marketshare difference that it does. Consider that there are very, very few desktop computers (read: not servers) out there that have Linux and don't also have a version of Windows, and that Linux video card support is pitiful unless you have at least a 3DFX, Matrox, or nvidia card, and even then only the nvidia cards are supported WELL. It won't happen soon - there are still a number of issues to work out - but to say that it won't happen for years, or ever, in an industry as radically dynamic as this is sheer ignorance. Keep in mind that Linux's marketshare continues to soar, it continues to become easier and easier to setup, configure, and use (not as much as Windows or Mac, but it is improving, and at a considerable rate) and that it is, technologically, able to handle anything that Windows can (often better) and it is not too hard to believe that it will become a major contendor. If anything has the potential, it's Linux. Keep in mind, we will soon have a linux game console, we already have a number of Linux appliances, and the PS2 may someday run Linux (it's more about boardroom politics than technology, Sony has already written a port) and in an effort to fight fire with fire with M$, if Sony uses Linux and the Indrema becomes a contendor, Nintendo just might follow suit as well to keep M$'s influence to a minimum. (Letting people use a similar framework for every major system that's not M$ would be a great way to keep them from gaining dominance (especially since the X-Box itself will likely be able to run Linux in very little time, seeing as the platform is mostly pre-existing, extremely well-supported hardware), which should be priority #1 for Sony and Nintendo, since having M$ gain enough momentum to be able to throw its weight around successfully would cause severe damage to both companies. This is all pure speculation. Salt to taste.) Think about it - Linux as a major game platform is not at all hard to believe.
These were created for the following reason: They actually do allow you to set up a number of applications in less time than if you program, without the hassles of debugging and with much less know-how. Once you know your way around Hypercard and the "easy languages" well enough, they can enable this. Usually. However, if you have a good, working knowledge of more advanced solutions you may find them to be more efficient - of course, there's always the learning curve involved in getting to that point (the single largest barrier) and also the extra work incurred with more complex projects - particularly debugging. And God help you if you try to do a large project in Assembler in a hurry... then again, that's what C, C++, Java, SQL, Perl (Yes, I know Perl is a scripting language, but it is more than obfuscated enough to avoid the "made for idiots" label - and the only one of the previous list who's code I can't easily read) and other such languages are for, along with the associated libraries and APIs that make your life easier. Now, if you're going to gripe, (not saying you are) gripe at the school for not knowing any better and not even teaching you programming. (HTML, and nearly all scripting languages (especially VB) do not qualify as programming IMO) That course sounds more like an introduction to basic content creation / problem solving using computer technology, while real programming involves the use of computer science, logic, and a host of other concepts that will likely never (fully) become involved in Hypercard and HTML. Or many scripting languages. I challenge you, however, to program a database with even limited animation in assembler faster than I can do so in Filemaker or some random Java IDE with SQL backend support (may not even be necessary with vectors and hash tables, depends on the project), while taking frequent coke breaks. Hell, I'll do a beer-run to give you a head-start. These things are designed to make you do as little as possible to get something done, by doing all the dirty work for you. If you use Assembler for anything other than scientific applications, compiler design, or OS design, you're out of your fscking mind... it's just too much work to tell it every little thing it has to do when you can just spit a few lines in a high-level language or use a visual tool to get the same job done.
Thanks a lot, now I'm gonna have to build a mini-keg ooled by a watercooled peltier. Inspiration can make you do strange things...
Someone oughta mod this up.
Exactly. No one has innovated recently because no one has had to rack their brains for ideas on how to get the hell out of whatever shithole the economy or politicians have left them in.
Ummm.. Move everything from old dirs to new dirs, then do a /usr/share/doc /usr/doc & ln -s /usr/share/dict/words /usr/dict/words
ln -s
And get on with your life
They should offer options to do things like this in the install and configuration tools, though. Would probably help if distros just did stuff like this a lot, such as fixing the confusion between modules.conf and conf.modules.
Of course, the Constitution is not all powerful. It's power is limited only to branches of government that feel like honoring it, apart from that, it's up to the whim of the entity involved. Why? LAWYERS. Even the Supreme Court has limited ability, branching from its inability to enforce certain types of judgements (it's not remotely recent, but the "trail of tears" comes to mind. They ruled against Jackson, so he just goes ahead and does what he wanted to do in the first place, and nobody could do a damn thing about it - leading to one of the greatest injustices of this country's history. Why? Because the Supreme court itself had no power to enforce.)
Here's another example: You can sign away your rights to free speech. The Disney-owned town of Celebration, about five-minutes-to-two-hours away from me depending on the time of day and volume of Disney-bound tourists present, requires all residents to do this in order to buy a house. This isn't the only ridiculous restriction placed on residents, there are others such as Disney retaining ownership of land and town approval being required for any changes to the exterior of a home that are more than subtle. Anyway, if you purchase a house in Celebration, you are legally tongue-tied. Say anything negative about Celebration, Disney, Celebratin School (of which I am a graduate) or whatever - and have them find out - and they 0wNz j00.
And then there's companies forcing online services to divulge users' personal information so that said users can be sued for bad-mouthing the plaintiff, breaking the DMCA, or whatever.
Other examples include gun control, the DMCA, and the very existence of the FCC. Not to mention, restriction on right to assemble (people have been arrested for assembling without flying an American flag. Don't ask me where the legal grounds on this are, but the judge ruled that as long as a flag flies, a person can say whatever they want. I don't think that case was appealed, I only heard of it second hand many, many years ago and don't have any details.)
I don't understand why Congress doesn't just go ahead and repeal about half of the Constitution in the first place. Guns, free speech, non-self-incrimination (the very use of which is considered incriminating in many cases - again, F*CKING LAWYERS), anything to do with minority rights, the list goes on and on. It's mostly just f*k1ng useless.
How does one overclock without a clock?
.5 times the bus speed and cannot do so reliably.
They'd better allow for the user to alter the speed in software. Maybe a dedicated software interface, that showed the intended speed and a disclaimer, and that could be set to different speeds in different modes (say, 100mhz-equivalent up until boot sector load) for safety purposes. I do see potential for the CPU and FSB not being tied so closely in speed, though I have to wonder about latency.
I see tremendous potential for this to be used to alter speed depending on the task, without disturbing other components.
For example, an OS could raise or lower the speed of the CPU and memory and other such components dynamically depending on usage, and act like it still has full speed, so that if you're only running an MP3 player that takes 5% system resources, the processor only runs at 10% or so of its normal capacity rather than being told to chill 95 out of every 100 cycles and running at full capacity. This can save mobile users a ton of power (bye bye speedstep) and trouble and also save power and heat for desktop users, who are finding power and cooling costs increasingly high over time. Not to mention, the prospect of temporarily increasing the speed of a CPU to deal with bursty system usage is nice as well, given temp monitoring facilities.
Ideally, in my opinion, the CPU should run as fast as it safely can given its current running temperature, and slow down as the OS tells it to do so or by intelligently metering HLT calls and lowering its speed as appropriate until it gets few HLTs. This would be an optimal setup, but is only possible with a CPU that allows for arbitrary speed changes. Multiplier-locked CPUs on a bus that likes to be left alone is not going to cut it, and for that matter neither will an unlocked CPU that only adjusts in increments of
I know that gota little off topic, but I see some serious potential for this aside from the theoretical speed increase. Just my $.02.
CD players just dumbly play what's on the disc. I could see some form of encryption using a weak serial-number-for-a-key system or something along those lines, but a CD player will see the data the exact same way on either a pressed or burned CD and simply won't care. If you do a simple raw copy, you're all set. Simple as that. Nero is great for this, as is Adaptec and I hear CloneCD, and on the *nix side a plain old dd to iso image should suffice.
If this technology works by screwing with the bytes so that they can't be normally read and relies on the player not to choke, then instead you can do the opposite - using a cd proggy that just reads and records, errors and all, faithfully, so that the copy looks identical to the way that the CD player sees it to begin with. I know Nero can do this, but that's as far as my limited knowledge reaches. This is essentially the digital equivalent of the good-old line-out to line-in hack. Or, you could do just that, you'd probably sacrifice quality but with the right equipment you just might be able to pull off a static-free, near-perfect copy using spdif on seperate sound cards, while playing the original CD digitally (win2k can do this with any drive that supports DAE.) I personally have both a SB Live! MP3+ and a Aureal SQ2500 (I happened to win the SB in a random drawing contest, the aureal card was my choice at first. I'm still undecided, I now use the SB for multimedia and the Aureal for games.) and I think I can get the Aureal to output in digital to the SPDIF input on the SB Live! barring issues with clock synchronization (though it may just be a resampling issue, which would mean a few CPU cycles but near-perfect quality.) Someday, when I feel gutsy and crazy enough to splice together an audio cable and a 9mm headphone plug, I'm going to try this.
I have to wonder what effect my SMP setup would have... Maybe I should boot into Linux instead and patch the kernel for low latency...
I do know one thing - if it does work, there wouldn't be an audible difference on all but the best audio systems provided sampling rates stay up. Maybe this would be better done on two seperate computers considering latency and multithreading, perhaps the recorder is best run under DOS or single-user Linux mode. Well, we'll see.
"I'm conflicted about this: on the one hand, I am concerned that companies will glom on to Vorbis, make proprietary extensions, and not release them back into the free software pool. Not good." Personally, I doubt this would happen - much. If they break compatibility, they have a seperate format. An incompatible format. Any changed made to Vorbis that they would want to use would necessitate a painstaking update to their own format, which may or may not break compatibility with the original broken format. It can become a complicated mess. Otherwise, a company that breaks compatibility would be on its own. In short, it pays to send a number of significant changes back to Vorbis unless they maintain full compatibility and can be easily re-ported. If a company is willing to go through this amount of trouble to make their own format, let them - they may as well be another Microsoft or RealNetworks, and they probably won't be able to generate sufficient steam on their own. OTOH, I'm all for proprietary (or free, whatever the case may be) extensions that count as "bells & whistles," the little incentives for using one program over another but that still allow you to switch back and forth or use platforms where a given program doesn't exist. Creativity, innovation, and diversity of ideas in software development is something that should be valued, cherished, and encouraged above all else. I don't want to prove Jim Allchin right, but part of the whole reason for OSS is to keep "new blood" thriving. BSD helps to stimulate that more than GPL because of its allowances of proprietary use. In this case, it's a good thing. It isn't always, sometimes we're better off with GPL - it depends more on the individual case. However, in cases where there is incentive to keep all the core stuff open, and maintain full compatibility, even when the license doesn't require it, such as there is here, we may as well be using BSD.
Many of Creative's modems have "MP3 COMPATIBLE" on the box in the corner... Guess that means that you have to have one of their modems (and one of the mp3 compatible ones at that) in order to download the mp3s "correctly." The only thing more ridiculous than that is that people probably believe it, and would choose it over other modems because they don't claim to have MP3 compatibility. A side note, Creative has a model of the SBLive called the Live! MP3 and now the MP3+5.1, but since these are made with amateur music playback, recording, and manipulation in mind and come with a veritable shiotload of software that does so, I can't gripe as much. Basically, it's just like the other "SBLive Value" clones, whereas the only differentiating factor is the software bundle. I actually won one of those at a drawing at my college, and I'm still trying to decide whether to switch over to it completely or stick with my good ol' Aureal Sq2500. In the meantime, they seem to play nice together, except for DOS emulation in Windows 9x...
The only problem with the island is the male/female ratio. There's what, four guy geeks to every girl geek? Besides, there's the hygiene concern - too many geeks go for too long without showers and use too little deoderant anyway.
Of course, the benefits of fiber-optic lines coming to everyone's house delivering speeds of over 1000 MB/S are hard to ignore....
Maybe we should all just move to Antarctica. I'm sure we cold easily clear off the snow from one of the more desloate regions (there isn't much stuff living there anyway), create a huge habitat, perhaps underground to conserve heat, with Penguin observatories poking up to observe some of the coolest (no pun intended) creatures on the face of the planet.
For energy, geothermal technology combined with solar power (six months on, six months off - could be worse) and massive batteries and perhaps large-scale distributed hydroelectric power harnessing ocean currents should suffice. To supplement heat, we's just duct off the exhaust from everyone's computers and cut down on the noise at the same time. Everyone would be encouraged to keep their computers running all the time, and there would be some kick-ass clusters set up running off of idle time. For solid fuels when absolutely necessary, mis-burned CDRs and Microsoft product's repsective packages will be imported and burned. So will Microsoft execs. We can make a sort of "biodome" inside to supply us with food and other natural resources. Dedicated lines to Russia, the most free country left standing.
Or, maybe a floating habitat kept in the Gulf of Mexico that moved to avoid hurricanes would work. All the solar power you'd ever need, nice weather, endless supply of water. The possibilities are endless.
Who knows, maybe we could even convert and build off of some oil rigs in the middle of nowhere.
What the heck, I thought I'd try to throw together a sample IP Agreement that both a company and an employee would find agreeable. It attempts to keep a company's IP and an individual's IP seperate, and offer rules for sharing, conflict, contamination, and the resulting consequences. IANAL, and all that. I don't suggest anyone actually try to USE this without putting it past a (damn good) lawyer first, regardless of which side you're on. Remember, it tries to be as fair as possible to all involved parties. Of course, screw up and it does little to protect you, regardeless of which side you're on. IP Agreement During the course of your employment at [company] you may, while not on company time or with the use or assistance of company property, freely invent and develop any projects you wish provided there is no conflict of interest between your product and any product being developed or sold by [company] without sanctions by the board. Any products that coincide with, but do not conflict with, any products being sold or developed are exempt and may be encouraged, with the restriction that they do not assist in violation of any end-user license agreement, offer functionality intended for future or enhanced versions of a product, or in any way hinder the ability of [company] to profit from its own IP. Any product you develop that is not affected by these restrictions is your own, and you may (or may not), at your discretion, license it or otherwise restricted information about it (restricted information is defined herein as information not normally available to the general public, including customers and non-customers alike, without some form of restriction. Any and all restrictoins apply, including information or product protected by licenses such as GPL or BSD or copyrighted or patented information or product) to [company] under any licensing scheme you choose without fear of ramification or reprisal from [company], and at the same time you may expect no preferential treatment by [company] outside of approved sanctions contained in the said license. Any licenses must be approved by a manager of higher company rank, and all licences will be treated as though given by an outside entity. For the purposes of licensing, you are considered a wholly seperate entity and your licensing and employment will be considered coincidental and unrelated unless there is a change of conditions as described herein. Termination of employment and termination of license are seperate. In addition, to use any product or ideas developed by any employee (including yourself) during company time or with the use or assistance of company property, which is consiered [company]'s IP, or any otherwise restricted information (again, defined as information not normally available to the general public, including both customers and non-customers, without some form of restriction) for any personal projects will require a license, which may (or may not) be provided at the discretion of [company], under the same basic rules applied to your own personal IP. Again, for licensing purposes, you are considered a seperate entity, termination of license and termination of employment are kept seperate, and any change of conditions as described herein may alter or nullify the license. The use of any of [company]'s IP in a personal project, or the use of your own personal IP in a company project, will be considered contamination, and you will either remove portions of the product that contain conflicting IP, alter the product in order to eliminate contamination, revert the project to the state it was in before contamination, form a valid license, or surrendur all involved IP that is your own to the company to be consequently considered its own IP, or face legal ramifications and termination at the discretion of your supervisor and/or [company]. While you may make these choice freely for your own work, company work is to be handled at the discretion of [company]. You will, however, be given the choice to license or surrendur the IP and none of your own personal IP will be taken from you without choice or negotiation. Any license or surrendur must be made with your full consent as well as [company]'s, however, [company] may, at its discretion, consider this grounds for dismissal, consider legal ramifications, surrendur its own IP to you, order you to remove your involved IP under supervision, revert the project to its previous, uncontaminated state, or remove your IP at its discretion without your involvement. You may, at [company]'s discretion, be considered financially responsible for decontamination and be docked pay for the time spent decontaminating company projects. Note that personal projects and property are defined as any work or development done outside of company time, without the use or assistance of company property. All work or developent done on company time or with the use or assistance of company property is considered company property outside of special sanctions that may be granted by [company]. Well, that's it for now. I know it needs a lot of refinement, but I guess if anyone's interested this could be useful for something or someone. I think there should be some kind of GPL IP agreement set up (there may be one FAIK) to allow someone like an open-source developer or whatever to work on proprietary projects, this more or less accomplishes that. I'm getting kind of burnt out, and am short on time to put into this, I'm sure I'm missing something but for the life of me, I have no idea what. Actually, now that I think of it, here's some issues: 1. Company uses your IP without your permission (think GPL for example) or without following a set license 2. Other employee uses your IP in a company project without permission 3. You use other employee's IP without permission 4. More consideration of use of free tools owned by either side, or open-source by either side, etc. both restrictions and the the lack thereof should be considered. Obviously, no need for restrictions for use of GPL'd code as long as GPL is not violated, etc.
"OTOH, the employer can't ban you from making competing products/solutions after you've quit our job with them. Then you should be a free man, free to earn money on your expertise."
Funny - I hear M$ does just that. They have been known to sue competitors for hiring former M$ employees since they have that kind of clause in the contract, and if they enter a new market, which they do CONSTANTLY, they immediately have the option of suing damn near every major competitor in the said market over this (remember, M$ is a huge company and is not without a proportionate turnover rate) even if they employed said workers well before M$ even considered entering the given market, or began work on development for projects in that market. Screwed up? Yes. Lawful? Probably. Ethical? Hell no.
At any rate, this is a problem rampant throughout the industry, affecting everyone from code pimps to humongous corporations.
Personally, I think we need some kind of laws that prevent these things, by restricting just how restricting an IP agreement can be and preventing or minimizing the effects of competing work clauses (or whatever they're called, IANAL) and the like. As long as there is no conflict of interest between an employee and a company, I feel that the individual should always have full rights to his/her code and the option to license it to the company at his/her discretion, with no fear of reprisal or any preferential treatment compared to other employees, whatever the case may be. In addition, I feel that as long as there are reasonable (minimal) restrictions covering trade secrets, a departing employee should have full freedom upon leaving a company to work wherever and on whatever he/she chooses. Basically, that's all that corporations really care about anyway, the protection of their own IP that they spend money on - and I feel that it is only reasonable to ask an employee to respect that, provided the employer shows the same respect for the employee's work.
If I had the time, I'd drop into legalese mode and try my hand at throwing together an IP agreement that could be considered fair and reasonable to all parties involved (maybe there should be a GNU IP agreement for use in developing proprietary technology? Sounds ironic, but there is definitely a need...)
Heck, I'll just go ahead and do it. I'll start a new thread.
Too bad that there seems to be no hope for MS pulling their heads out of their rears. I hope no one actually believes that they are trying to protect their rights to innovate - they don't actually have the need for that in the first place, since they rarely, if ever innovate - but are actually trying to protect their rights to plaigariaze. Can you say hypocrytical? That, and they're trying to place a legal roadblock in front of anyone trying to speed up and take away marketshare from them.
MS, when I see you build a better product than Linux, I'll believe it. The only time I can get Linux to crash (I have tried) is by trying to use the beyond-buggy, unsupported, proprietary drivers for my Aureal sound card in Linux (kernel modules) or by doing an intentional local DoS exploit involving the use of too many processes. I can crash Windows 2000, however, using my Aureal-based sound card drivers (actually work usually, but still are unsupported (not just since Aureal went under, same for the Linux ones, btw) and occasionally bluescreen), doing a local DoS, running certain applications, and just plain using the system. I experience two to three crashes a day in Win2K, and NONE in Linux unless I do something really, really, really stupid. I can't even explain most of my Win2K crashes.
True that.
It seems that with the DMCA, MS's new restrictions on media in Windows XP, and their desire to see OSS outlawed (I was actually going to say in a post sometime soon that if MS could have their way, they'd probably outlaw open source ASAP.. Looks like Jim Allchin has beaten me to the punch by implying that they would), the ability of the DMCA to be leveraged to completely eliminate Fair Use and circumvent the First Ammendment in order to favor corporations over consumers, and the FCC banning consumer use of technologies like HDTV other than for viewing purposes, that if things continue to go along this path, than this country just might fill the gap left in the Communist ideal when the USSR collapsed.
Except this time, it's for the sake of corporations rather than the government (but lately, the distinction has become less and less prevalent..)
I can see it now:
I pledge allegiance, to the very existence, of the Great Corporations Of America, and to the stockholders for which they stand, no tolerance, under Gates, uncircumventable, with invoices and subpeonas for all.
Don't even get me started on patents.
It seems that legislators are finally getting the right idea. The question is whether or not they will follow through and reform the current mess that is IP law.
I sent this in. Here's my comments, for your viewing pleasure. Warning: This is LONG.
.edu sites for no real reason.
In regards to public filters, my suggestions:
1. Allow libraries to choose their own filter products.
2. Suggest or require that libraries use filtering products whose parent company discloses what criteria is used when blocking or allowing a site (many don't) since many sites may be blocked for often poor reasons, sometimes even on a whim, or if they go against an individual's beliefs or agenda (even if the sites are not in any way profane or could be considered dangerous.) Here's a few articles of interest:
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/12/08/0238239.shtml about a decrypted filtering list used by SmartFilter, which found a number of sites obviously mis-rated. As with everything else on Slashdot, there are a number of interesting comments appended to this article.
http://dfn.org/focus/censor/contest.htm A contest, apparently to find the most ridiculous examples of filtering - such as a high school student that couldn't access his own high school's web page from its own library since the filter automatically blocked the word "high" from domain names. The runner up, Hillary Anne, tried to register her email address at Hotmail as hillaryanne@hotmail.com but the filtering software spotted the word "aryan" hidden in her name... A number of other examples exist here, too. Richard "Dick" Armey's Web site is blocked by Netnanny, Surfwatch, Cybersitter, N2H2, and Wisechoice, the very same filters he promotes - because his site contains the word "dick." And, this excerpt from the article:
The conservative group Focus on the Family intends its anti-porn site Pure Intimacy to be a "resource for those struggling with sexual temptations" and the "psychological bondage" that is "a major reason why individuals go online." Jim K. observed that Cybersitter blocked this site for violating the following categories: porno, hardcoreporno, sexual, nudity, and, of course, bondage.
I could go on and on, but just visit that contest site - it does.
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/03/09/133243.shtml about Symantec's I-Gear software and a hack that revealed its true nature - reporting user information back to Symantec and blocking - unnecessarily - a number of
About I-Gear, the high school I graduated from - Celebration - used it, but only for monitoring, since they believed it to be too unreliable and preferred to go after students that continued to visit sites that they themselves could deem inappropriate. They could check for sites that were inappropriate, some of which the filtering software would miss, and would be able to ignore sites that weren't really inappropriate at all but were otherwise blocked by the software anyway. I only know of one site that was blocked, which was a message board for people complaining about the town of Celebration, which has a policy that forbids anyone living there from practicing their first-ammendment rights (they sign them away.) involving negative comments about the town. Whether the site was blocked because of over-use or if it was blocked for more political reasons is unknown to me. I also do not know if they continue this more involved practice of checking the records themselves.
Having read the article on the contest, however, I really can't say I blame them!
4. Take steps to protect privacy. Notably, Mattell's filter software (cybernanny, I believe, but I'm not sure) has been accused of spying on the user. A good idea would be banning any software that reports back to the filtering software company. This information is often sold for profit, for uses like targeted advertising or for "spamming."
5. Allow institutions to selectively add or remove individual sites. Given the above information, I feel that this is more than reasonable. Researching Fibonacci's sequence tripped up one filter, for example - so much for a student's math homework.
6. Please endorse free and open source solutions. An open product would allow for anyone to suggest that a site be added or removed because of its content, and allows for a debate over sites that otherwise could be blocked or allowed on a whim. In the case of open software, a library could be instead required to go through the developer for a change to be made (improving the integrity of the filters). In addition, allowing for different "levels" of filtering might be desired - allowing for different levels of appropriateness similar to movie ratings. For example, while no minor should access pornography, "adult language" isn't really a problem for 16-year-old students (anyone who's ridden on the back of a school bus can vouch that most elementary school students don't have much trouble with it either, but that's another story.). As an added benefit, they're free, and libraries, schools, and the like could use the money. Unfortunately, however, I know of no open-source filters at this time (much of the tech community is anti-filter anyway, since they disagree with cencorship of all but the most objectionable content.)
7. Allowing users to gain higher levels of access in order to be able to find more diverse material upon proving age is probably a good idea. In middle school, my required reading occasionally had some amount of profanity, which nearly all filters would immediately modify or block. Filters would also block a number of perfectly legitimate phrases. Saying "I'll just be in and out of the store really quick" would be blocked by any filter that watches for the phrase "in and out" (and I'm sure that there's a filter out there that does, or will.) The upside to this is that a number of areas of interest could be blocked to younger users, such as a study on homosexuality that, while perfectly fine for an older teenager or adult to read, may not be read by children if their parents would prefer they didn't. In addition, allowing parents to selectively add and remove restrictions on various areas of interest that could be considered "gray areas" would be good. While it's fairly obvious that pornography, bomb-making recipies, marijuana growing tips, and the like should be blocked, a number of areas such as human anatomy, homosexuality, religion, and discussions or even readings of banned books (Catcher In The Rye, for example, which many schools and libraries still censor but some embrace as a literary masterpiece) and research reports on the aforementioned topics could be considered "gray areas" that some ages could be allowed or denied access to, and that parents could control more. Allowing a filter software provider of full control over what users can see, and deeming everything to be either bad or good (as is done now) is, obviously, less than desirable. Personally, I don't see what a political campaign and hardcore bestiality have in common, but may programs will block both at once and don't discriminate. Since there is no clear-cut means of deciding what to block, etc., allowing for more flexibility is ideal.
Personally, I think a standard should be defined for filtering software:
1. NO reporting back to ANYONE other than local administrators on what users have been doing. Privacy should be protected and only necessary exceptions to that should be allowed. Corporations have no business knowing what a child does online. However, the local administrator and certain individuals (parents, perhaps teachers, etc.) should be able to review logs of what a user does (and all usage should be logged! This offers recourse in the event that a site that is inappropriate, but not yet blocked, is visited.) No one that has no business in knowing should be able to review an individual's usage of computer resources.
2. Material should be broken down into different "categories" by their topic and the objectionability of each, and a separate standard should be set for which categories are to be blocked to all users, which should be blocked to older teens, to younger teens, etc. and unless unlocked by an authorized operator (eg. A librarian) the software will assume that the user on the given station is a toddler, or a member of the most restricted group.
3. Aside from mandatory blockings (such as porn) that are simply blocked, period, parents and local administrators should be able to define restrictions for the aforementioned "gray areas," topics that may or may not be objectionable to some. While administrators would be able to specify general restrictions by user groups, parents would have the option to selectively modify their individual child's restrictions (aside, of course, from the mandatory blocks such as bona fide pornography.) A standard should be set for what gray areas will and won't be blocked, that should be enabled by default on all software, but that is modifiable by the local administrator.
4. Administrators should be able to selectively alter site lists. As demonstrated by the previous examples, a local administrator really is no less trustworthy of what should be blocked and allowed than the software developers, so as long as site visiting is logged, there should be no problem.
5. Word and phrase filters should be avoided, and only the most extreme examples used. For example: "sex" should not be blocked as the word is often used for gender and appears accidentally within a number of phrases, "cum" appears, among other places, in the word cucumber, "breast" would prevent discussion of breast cancer (America Online once inadvertently did this).
Government-produced, multi-platform software is likely a plus for this. Since this will cost a great deal of money for each institution to set up, avoiding for-pay services will be a tremendous benefit.
I would suggest finding and endorsing an open-source effort for creating filtering software and push to see the above features implemented, or for the government to spearhead an effort itself. A number of programmers would become involved for the opportunity to protect their children/nieces/nephews/neighbors and still minimize censorship that is simple unnecessary. An open source model, under government supervision and control, would enable tremendous security and quality and minimize potential for abuse, while allowing for an amazingly rapid exposure rate for newly-appearing sites.
At any rate, I would appreciate a reply on this. This hits close to home for nearly all Internet users, especially the more technologically-inclined like myself. The simple fact is, currently available solutions simply are not ready for public use and are very much unrefined, and a fair implementation is impossible.
This is really the best for someone who needs a laptop's functionality and power but also needs to be able to take notes without the limitations of a cropped-down QWERTY keyboard (ie. college students, especially in math and comsci classes) I'd like to see good flowchart and composite software. What would be really sweet would be a program that tried to translate into ASCII as you went along, but kept undecipherable letters in their original bitmapped form along with apparent mispellings or misstrokes (kind of how Adobe Acrobat does OCR - it translates what it can, and simply includes what it can't.) and also allow for drawings, diagrams, etc.
This would be perfect for me (PDAs, particularly palmtops, have size and flexibility limitations for doing serious work) to use, if only it were cheaper. I'd buy it for $2000, but as always, laptops must be overpriced. I'd also like a (much) bigger screen, but that's asking for a little much.
Above all, use the 2.4 kernel whenever posssible if you do SMP. The 2.4 kernel shows noticable improvement over 2.2 even on a 2-processor machine, and while optimized for 8 or less processors, has been reported to run on 64 processors (though I can't remember just who did this, might have been Linux Care but I really doubt this). It doesn't have NUMA yet, though this will probably be the next major change to Linux the way things are looking now. At any rate, just stick to 2.4 if you do use SMP. It scales far beyond its predecessor, to an extreme. Just review the list of changes and you'll see what I mean. (Gawd, I'd love to see some 'Mindcraft' benchmarks now!)
Also, check your drivers for SMP compatibility, some are better than others and have reputations for it. On the extremely rare occasions that you can get a manufacturer-supplied driver, you should be ok if it's hardware meant for big boxes like this.
Lastly, don't forget clusters. (warning: a long rant on clustering follows, if you aren't interested, this is the time to hit 'Back')
Linux is probably the ideal solution for clusters because of its efficiency and reliability, and the fact it hoses just about everything that is benchmarked against it on lower-end (ie. two processors or less) machines. If you have a lot of clients on the network that perform mundane tasks (ie. word processing, most spreadsheets, etc. that don't fully utilize system resources), utilizing idle cycles ala SETI@Home, combined with a network renovation to 100TX or better (not very expensive these days, but you'd want to eliminate the use of hubs for any machines involved, since bandwidth is at a premium) could yield a lot of horsepower that, at the very least, could supplement your big box (especially in the off hours provided the computers are left on). The money invested in this may give you more bang for the buck than buying new equipment, and if you want to do clustering smaller machines instead of one big box, you can use the remaining money to buy a set of dedicated machines and string them together on gigabit fiber-optic or something, and then bridge them to the rest of the network. x86 machines are great for clustering, PPC is a little overpriced for the power it gives you in many standard configurations(especially compared to Athlon processors if you do floating-point-intensive stuff) unless you use Apple's Altivec, where PPC tends to kick butt, and as for SPARC, ALPHA, MIPS, and anything I forgot to list here, you're on your own since I've never fooled with any of these. If you want to cluster, I'd stick to whatever the rest of the network uses so you only have to code for one processor.
Part of that slowness that many users complain about is bottlenecks that not all people have and the design of the code itself (read some of the previous replies). Lately I have started using Jipe for an IDE, a nice eficient IDE that, under IBM's Windows NT 3.0 JVM with a JIT, feels just as fast as Notepad (just takes a few seconds to load, that's the price you pay for using a JIT.) I don't remember exactly where to get Jipe and it is still a beta release, but the functionality we all care about is there and works well. It's GPL, btw.
On the other hand, when I tried using Forte under Mandrake Linux 7.1 with a heavily optimized kernel and using SMP at that, it was a little slow to respond. This could be attributed to the crappy XFree86 3.xx Savage 2000 drivers, or to bloat code, or even to the fact that this was the first full release of IBM Java 3 for Linux. You be the judge.
Java Workshop, however, where I used to do all of my programming (and is buggy and bloated as hell) looked and felt just like a native app under both Solaris and Windows, and even ran on my 486 (though, it didn't run well at all.)
I should probably point out, though, that IBM's JVM has been shown the overall fastest and most efficient on any platform, and runs nicely on Linux. Even on my heavily optimized and overclocked system, it ran without a hitch on Linux.
Just out of curiosity, what native compilers are there that can be used free of charge (OSS is always nice but free will never draw complaints) and will allow me to produce binaries for at least Linux and Windows? A common issue is distribution, if you want to have users download a program, they won't want to download a newer JRE to run it and slower systems (Pre-Celeron) may have performance issues that would be absent in native apps.
Hmm... I'd say that in terms of raw capability, a PC that was high-end a year ago (read: 500+mhz and a GeForce) should be able to at least match a PS2 in games (though I'd but anything better than a cacheless Celeron as better for non-gaming applications.) The thing is, a PS2 doesn't have to display at a screen resolution any higher than 800X600, where many gamers play their games at 1024X768 resolution or higher (depends, though.) A lot of it is software, however. Games can be better optimized for a console than a PC, since the console allows for direct hardware access while a PC (since there isn't a set standard for communicating with the incredible diversity of video cards, sound cards, processors, etc. out there) has its games programmed (usually) to use on of three APIs: OpenGL (Best performance and compatibility overall for most uses but only covers graphics), DirectX (M$ only, typically a tad slower than OpenGL but supposedly easier to develop with, and also covers sound and has better 2d features, but tends to have lower-quality drivers especially from ATI and S3), and GLide (Best performance for 3DFX hardware, and is exclusive to 3DFX hardware. Used to be the standard but now is by far a minority) All three of these APIs depend on drivers written by the hardware manufacturers, and themselves are executed through an operating system. So, PCs have (usually) at least three layers to go through to communicate with hardware, while a console usually will have no more than one. Also, it is important to note that since the PS2 and other consoles stay at low resolutions, they are optimized as such while video cards are designed to support a wider range of resolutions. I firmly believe, however, that any reasonable fast computer (above 500mhz with a FSB of 100 or higher (FSB is important, as it directly affects memory bandwidth - ties in directly to DDR RAM, though Rambus is figured differenly because of higher latency (bad) and fewer bits for clock cycle (also bad)), meaning Pentium 3s, Durons, Athlons, and overclocked Celerons) with at least a GeForce2 MX will beat a PS2 or Dreamcast at the same resolution in Quake3 using the same features and effects, in terms of raw framerate and also quality. Keep in mind, Quake3's engine is used as the basis of a number of new and upcoming console games on the DC and PS2, so if there is not already a port there may be one soon. Also, computers can use more advanced features sometimes independant of the game's code (thus enhancing games that predate a given feature) such as full hardware anti-aliasing that makes a HUGE difference on flight sims/racing sims for 3DFX cards. Of course, as games improve support for some other technologies, the expandable and scalable nature of the PC pushes it ahead. Currently, about the only way to enjoy SMP (using two or more processors at once in a computer) is running Quake3 while using a NVidia card (most gamer cards have SMP-incompatible drivers), but this will eventually change. SMP is relied upon heavily in 3D modeling (like that used to design the games that run on the PS2) and for servers, and is known to produce tremendous improvements in compatible games. With the SMP-capable Celerons (they all are, I have two 366s running at 525mhz in my box and they ROCK) and the upcoming SMP support for Durons and Athlons, anyone can build a cheap SMP box that can take on systems much more expensive - and if you are willing to get an expensive box to begin with, just a little more money will make ONE BADASS BOX. One last thing (this is far too long already): Is the PS2 capable of advanced 3D positional sound with headphones, 2 speakers, 4 speakers, or a 5.1-channel system? My PC is. The soundcards to do this can be found for under $100 easily, the older Aureal Vortex2 (which have a questionable future though are still the home positional audio kings) can be had for as little as $40 or less if you look in the right places and they offer the best positional audio in existence (though Creative's EAX is catching up.) Positional audio in Quake is truly an awesome experience, as long as you remember to dodge the rocket with the mouse and not your torso :)
Sorry, but about the IO limitations: They are a bottleneck, but DDR and Rambus take away a significant portion (which is better is still impossible to gauge since there is still no way to do a true direct comparison. Theoretically, they are similar in real-world performance). AGP is pretty fast, though it could be faster (It's little more than a PCI slot at 66mhz (as opposed to 33) with access to system memory, Apple used an 83mhz PCI slot for video in their G3s which was arguably faster than AGP - but no direct comparison.)
Fat32 ran just fine in 95 (arguably more efficiently than in 98, just like everything else) just not in the first release. I've installed Windows 95 onto fat32 partitions many times before, not using OSR2. As far as hardware support, the only advantage that 98 has is slightly better USB and slightly better IRQ sharing. The other 95% of what 98 has most people don't want, especially since 90% of what 98 has that 95 doesn't is new bugs. I don't use IE integration and personally don't see any truely useful purpose for it that even remotely justifies the performance and reliabiliy hit. Even on a modern machine, removing IE integration provides a considerable speed increase, and slower machines (especially 100mhz/32MB RAM) show a tremendous benefit. Personally, I ran 98Lite which gives the core of 98 (slightly more efficient and functional than 95, and lets you install newer M$ software that claims to require newer 98 features) while using the 95 shell. I could read 8G partitions in Windows 95 Explorer, saved 8M hardware RAM (given the horribly inefficient use of memory in Windows 9x, this does make a difference, especially since this never seemed to get swapped). This approach is slightly faster than 95, and hella faster than 98, and usually only crashed when Windows ran out of "system resources" which is purely an annoying architectural limitation in all Windows but NT/2000 that will not improve in the least between machines with 8M and 2G of RAM. BTW, there were ways to make the original 95 run with FAT32. Of course, if you were comfortable running with two partitions or more, and didn't face severe cluster waste (few people actually did) then you would find much better speed in FAT16. I still use fat16 for everything except my Windows 2000 partition (NTFS) and my dedicated Documents partition (fat32, just for size.) Everything else, including swap partitions, two games partitions, and a windows 98Lite partition (just for running games) are Fat16 for speed. It would be nice if EXT/2 was supported in Windows, since it's faster than anything Windows is capable of using (aside from arguments for journaling, but those have been invalidated by ReiserFS and the upcoming EXT/3). I know it's a long post, I need to work on brevity. I just get POd by people that actually think that Microsoft has done anything useful since Windows 95 for the mainstream user, not that NT was all that good either (Where Windows 2000 is now, at least under the hood, NT should have been at five years ago. UNIX was there ten years ago.)
All of the extra software features are just like free gravy, you don't pay for it - and if you didn't have them, the architecture would almost certainly allow you to add the functionality. USB is probably to be used for the controllers, probably a good thing as it is both inexpensive and very expandable (as far as standard user input devices like controllers go) allowing for more controllers than you'd ever need to use and other peripherals, like mice, that follow normal standards to be used. In other words, you don't have to shell out money for proprietary devices since it uses normal standards - you may already have the needed extras attached to your computer. DVD isn't expensive, and it does add the functionality of DVD playback at little to no extra cost. It does allow for much more storage than CDs, however. Consider that Final Fantasy 7, which had so many movie files it ran up three CDs, would not only have fit onto a single DVD but would have loaded faster and could have used industry standard MPEG-2 with almost no extra coding effort, while providing excellent quality and efficient (considering quality and available space) use of disk space. A lot of the cost for the PS2 comes from the R&D put into the new chip, the low supply, the demand (as it is a new product) and the premium that goes with all things new. Compare a 730 mhz Pentium 3 to a 1 ghz Pentium 3 in price and performance, and you'll see this same trend. You pay more for new stuff simply because it's new and because the manufacturer can charge you for it. This is a good choice for those who don't have a computer capable of modern games or would like the uncomplication of a console. There is a lot to like about this system, and since we can expect it to sell for less than the X-box, it may do very well. Keep in mind that it will probably be a trivial matter to make Indrema games work on your PC (Same processor, and they have to publish any changes they make to any existing GNU/Linux code), so you just may find yourself rooting for this little console that could. Once again, the computer stuff is gravy. It's not hurting anything, and if it were a plain-vanilla console with the same standard specs (by standard I mean the standards that modern gamers hold a new console to), and no extras, the capability would still be there. It's nice to have, and for those without good computers or an existing DVD, this is a great choice. Besides, having your multimedia seperate from your computer is a nice feature to have, since it tosses away the added complication of using a computer for simpler functions like MP3 playing. One other note, though - this does let you use standard ISPs.