User: revbob

Re:Your last words.

On: Boeing to Have Net Access on Airliners in 2002

Newsgroups: alt.aviation.safety
Re: Crashing
From: Bertie the Bunyip

> This DC-9 is pitching around and around and headed
>for the ground.
>Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

Your use of the obsolete designator "DC-9" for the MD-80 aircraft indicates you know nothing about aviation. And motion around the axis of thrust isn't "pitching". It's called "roll".

You deserve to die.

Sell, sell, sell!

On: CD burning Will Never Be The Same

Roxio's strategic alliance with EMI follows their strategic alliance with Microsoft in Windows Media Player 7.

When you get into bed with a giant, you gotta expect he'll roll over during the night. Roxio's management seems to be so ignorant of a fact that's left a string of empty buildings from Fisherman's Wharf to Los Gatos that they've gotten into bed with two giants.

This is called the Dance of the Doomed.

The only sensible advice to shareholders of ROXI is contained in the subject line.

If you don't own any shares in Roxio -- and why you'd have held any after their announcement of the alliance with MSFT escapes me -- and if you don't use their Easy CD Creator/Direct CD -- another "in God's name, why?" kind of practice --this is a NOP. Roxio won't be here to worry about this time next year.

And if there's anybody on /. who didn't already know that Windows and Office XP were going to be very nasty propositions -- helLOOOOOOO!

I didn't know Philip Jose Farmer

On: Sony's Double Density CD-RW Drive Reviewed

wrote ISO specs.

Or am I too old for anyone to catch this reference?

Re:Why Upgrade?

On: Microsoft Postpones Office XP Subscriptions

My company is the archetypal "Microsoft shop" - Boeing (for whom I do not speak, yadda yadda yadda). I mean, we were early implementors of Exchange (yuck!), we get to take Office home for the cost of the media, we can get Visual Studio if we use it at work, out IT folks make huge noises about how if you don't run the "company standard platform" you could get in Big Trouble -- the Big Airplane Company is very much in bed with Microsoft.

I find it curious that only now is Boeing upgrading to Office 2000, and we're just finishing upgrading all our desktops from Win95 to NT4. Not only isn't XP (Windows or Office) in the pipeline, it isn't even on the horizon.

If a company that's as cozy with MICROS~1 as Boeing is isn't sending them huge globs of cash for the latest and greatest Windows and Office, imagine what LockMart or Exxon or the other Fortune 50 companies are doing.

I don't think MSFT's corporate bread and butter customers ever bought into their 2-year cycle of discard and replace. Even IT managers whose driveways mysteriously gained new Porsches have a hard time convincing their CEOs that it's time to negotiate a new contract with MSFT when they just finished nailing down the old one.

And if they feel like they got a good deal (CEO's who've negotiated hard always think they got a good deal), why not ride it out as long as they can?

So the short answer as to why Microsoft is pulling back on their plans for XP is a problem I've been waiting to come home to roost there for some time: not just revenue, but cash flow. You can ride on the back of a tiger only so long before he turns around and notices you. All this scurrying around MSFT is doing with .NET and software rental is because they're beginning to realize that their ride is over.

It's Business Week for chrissakes

On: Cracking OSX

Let me repeat that: Business Week.

Like you expected them not to believe closed source == more secure?

Re:Assembly language on ISS

On: Space Station BSOD

You were either misinformed or you misunderstood what your interviewer said.

Real time software for mission critical systems is written in Ada. That's a no-brainer. If there is any assembler, it's tiny, of severely limited scope, and meticulously tested. In fact, having worked with some very low level networking code for ISS (in Ada), I doubt there's any assembler in there at all.

As to the 386's, they're rad hardened and known reliable. And, unlike the home computer I bought a couple of months ago that's state of the art, whether I need state of the art or not, the jobs these CPUs had to do simply didn't require anything faster than a 386, even given a hefty allowance of spare cycles and memory for future growth.

We bought what we needed (in space, rad hardening is not optional) and we didn't buy what we didn't need. That's not $400 hammers, that's the definition of responsible stewardship of the public's money.

Lyrics to "So Fine" by the Persuasions(?)

On: What Isn't on the Internet?

So fine
So fine
My baby so doggone fine
doo-do-de-doo-do-de (hand in mine?)
Oh-oh-oh-ohhhh
Yeah-eah-eah-eahhhh
So fine

And lyrics in general.

The Harry Fox Agency has managed to close down a source of information so universally acknowledged as useful that it was one of the first archives/search sites on the web.

The story is told in part here and here and here.

The parable of the dog in the manger, who can't eat the hay himself, but prevents others from eating it, has never been more appropriate.

Haven't you been interviewed by these guys?

On: EvansData can't tell BSD from Linux

Oh, not Evans data, necessarily, but some of these companies that produce "exclusive executive reports"?

They've got a terrific little racket going there. Would you like to find out how you too can MAKE MONEY FAST in the challenging, high tech world of executive reports?

While thousands have paid big bucks to find out, because you readers of /. are special, I'll tell you for free.

What you do is find a technology, find a newsgroup or list around the technology, get the names of the folks on the list who post a lot, and start making phone calls.

You tell your interviewees that if they give you an interview, they'll get a free copy of the report.

Now here's the sweet part: make sure some of the people on your list work for a "prestige" company. Then, because you've given the person at that company a free copy of the report, just as you've promised, that company goes on your list of clients which you present to people you're trying to sell these reports to. "Oh", say your victims, "if XYZ is interested in this technology, I'd better pay the couple of hundred bucks and read the report myself."

I work for, uh, a company that makes a lot of airplanes, and my research interests require me to be involved in some open forums. So I turn away about one of these interviews a month.

I did give a couple of interviews, and did in fact get my reports, and the reports were pitiful: 50 pages with lots of white space, revealing an unclear grasp of both the technology and the marketplace. For instance, one guy who calls me regularly seems to be obsessed with Windows CE and its threat to the established players in the embedded RTOS market. Yeah, that's going to happen.

What I suspect is, he's no more clueless than his customers, and he's found some customers who are willing to pay for reports on that subject.

Which reveals the other sweet part of this racket: you can issue another report 6 months later on "Changing Trends in the X Market". Just interview the same people (if you're moderately ethical) all over again.

Frankly, I don't know why anybody bothers to learn how to be a spammer. This is where the money is.

I'm a little bit hazy on the details of how you sell these reports and who you sell them to, but evidently somebody knows, and it must not be that hard. As Barnum noted, a potential customer for your executive reports is born approximately every sixty seconds.

The RIAA's plans for digital distribution

On: Dear CDDB Users: Thanks For Helping The RIAA!

if the RIAA are smart enoenough to use technology to persue technology then why is it taking soo damn long to implement a technology which we'd want to pay for and use!!

Simple. First, nobody doubts that the RIAA companies, singly or in concert, can hire people who can devise a very good technology to digitally distribute their "property" in a way that will satisfy their requirements.

They may even be bright enough to do some market research and find a mechanism that doesn't aggravate their target audience too much -- I wouldn't bet on that, but it's possible.

The question is, do they want to? And I think the answer is, no, not very much.

You've got two world-views within the recording industry:

1. One world-view hopes that digital distribution will simply go away if they stick their fingers in all the holes in the dike.
2. Another world-view recognizes that the holes in the dike aren't enumerable, and that digital distribution is coming whether they want it or not.

In neither case is Napster part of their plans. In the first world-view, they're the enemy and must be destroyed. In the second, they're a competitor and must be destroyed.

There never was any hope that Napster would be spared.

Death of the Internet -- film at 11

On: The Problem With Portals

The closing paragraph in the article is revelatory:

"At some point, if content on the Internet isn't worth paying for," Mr. Kenney said, "it is going to have trouble surviving."

I just adore this point of view, and encourage Mr. Kenney and his ilk to get out now, while the getting's good. Don't let the door....

Eva Schindler-Rainman, one of the people I admire inordinately for her work on voluntarism, and who I got to meet, said "if you need money, money is always available. Worry about making a good case, and you can find the money."

Maybe some of today's ad-subsidized websites will be tomorrow's foundation-subsidized websites. Maybe there'll be government grants (I'm surprised the UK hasn't already gone for this) that reward people for putting up information and supporting dialogue.

And while there are funding sources that love to do pilot projects and move on, other sources (a bit harder to find, but they're there) are interested in sustaining existing efforts past the pilot project stage.

People think that an order of magnitude decrease in the cash that's going into the net would be disastrous. I think that's nonsense. If we don't have Wal-Mart on the Web any more, exactly what do we lose?

Neither Schacker nor RMS understands the issue

On: GPL 3.0 Concerns in Embedded World

Or, far likelier, the reporter doesn't understand it and asked RMS the wrong questions.

Schacker's example, the ethernet switch, sounds like about the fourth thing he'd say to a reporter who persisted in not getting the point.

And RMS says that linking with glibc doesn't subject the code to the GPL, while creating a new product containing GPLed code and your code does, thereby ignoring the very area that's under discussion -- the stuff in the grey area in between.

A better example might be that in order for a Linux filesystem to access a VxWorks device, there's going to have to be some relations between the codebases that isn't legal between near relatives (except perhaps in Mississippi), or else the interface is going to be lousy.

Some interfaces aren't flat, polished surfaces with MIL-STD connectors at a predefined point -- they're full of hills and valleys or they merge like blobs in a lava lamp. And that's not because the designers didn't follow the principles they were taught with toy examples in college. It's because the problem domain demands that kind of solution space.

I think somebody who actually understands what the issue is needs to quiz RMS on it, because this is important and his elementary-school examples illustrating the extremes aren't sufficient for this problem.

Re:OK, I'll bite:

On: Postcard From The Real-Time Linux Workshop

This isn't exactly responsive to your question, but here's one of my favorite definitions, from the DoD Glossary of Modeling & Simulation Terms:

Real-Time System: A system that computes its results as quickly as they are needed by a real-world system. Such a system responds quickly enough that there is no perceptible delay to the human observer. In general use, the term is often perverted to mean within the patience and tolerance of a human user.

The Jargon File says:

real time 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the {canonical} example. Such applications often require special operating systems (because everything else must take a back seat to response time) and speed-tuned hardware. 2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something while people are watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find the calling procedure's program counter on the stack and she came up with an algorithm in real time."

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Re:Non-embedded RTOS? Why?

On: Postcard From The Real-Time Linux Workshop

So why would anyone need a non-embedded RTOS?

• So you can run the whole thing on one box.
• So you don't have to fool with loading the I/O software onto the Big Box O' I/O
• So you can debug easily (in-system software debuggers instead of ICEs)
• So you can reduce your latency between the I/O box and the main box.
• So you can run applications on your main box instantly when you get a particular I/O event.
• So your I/O system can do high-level-ish stuff itself.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Re:Good worst case times with Hard RT

On: Postcard From The Real-Time Linux Workshop

Is this good/bad/ok for real life applications?

Very good.

Whats the performance of other RTOSs?

Depends on the CPU (duh!) but about that. This is in the neighborhood of context switch time, which is where it needs to be for a RTOS. The important thing is that it's an order of magnitude better than the scheduler clock, which is the latency you're pretty much stuck at if you don't have a RTOS.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

The first RTOS to offer this capability?

On: Postcard From The Real-Time Linux Workshop

A goal for the near-term future is to be able to run real-time tasks in userland with all of the memory protections provided by unix, on all real-time Linux variants. Emanuele Bianchi has already done this on RTAI! Real-time Linux (as far as I know) is the first real-time OS to offer this capability.

Er, not exactly. I was accomplishing the same result in a TCP/IP driver for an FDDI board I wrote for VxWorks back in 1990.

Basically, you do at real interrupt level what you need to do there and stuff the functions that don't need to be done at real interrupt level into a ring buffer which then feeds a high priority task that fetches the function calls off its ring buffer one by one and executes them. As you exit your driver you call for a scheduling event. Because you can set hard, non-degrading task priorities, your cleanup task inevitably runs immediately. Other arriving messages are pretty much a don't-care (they interrupt the high-priority task), so long as you don't swamp your CPU with messages.

For example, suppose you get a device interrupt from your network board. At real interrupt level you check to see if a packet has arrived, and if it has, you stuff it into mbufs (actually, clusters). You queue the rest of the packet processing (e.g., the IP function table calls) for your high priority "cleanup" task, and you call high-level stuff like non-blocking select() in your application.

If you start off with a BSD-style driver, it's pretty easy to figure out what absolutely has to happen at real interrupt level and what can be thrown to a high priority task.

Being able to write our own driver came in very handy, because we used a broadcast message over FDDI as a synchronization event. All the applications signed up a function that did a taskResume on their main executive whenever that message arrived. The high priority task checked each incoming message to see if anybody had signed up to run something when it arrived, and if so, ran it (probably by sticking it into the ring buffer for the next-highest priority task -- can't remember any more -- maybe I just ran it then).

On a later version we got rid of some of the overhead by making the resumer function give a semaphore and had the executive wait for the semaphore at the bottom of its main loop. Since semaphores were queued, even if an application overran its time slot, it wouldn't lose a frame (within reason).

It's good to see that real time Linux seems to climbing up to where it can stand alongside the RTOSs, and, having had a source license for VxWorks, I can testify that having source on hand makes a real difference in a crunch, not only to fix bugs, but to figure out work-arounds. Nobody's documentation is ever good enough, and the source code never lies.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

My EULA

On: EULA In Games

As a developer of Free Software, I've come up with my own EULA that meets my needs perfectly:

All these programs are copyrighted © by Bob Crispen and are provided without charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License and other licenses as READMEware: In return for the software, you promise to read the documentation.

If anybody emails me with a really stupid question that I've already answered in the documentation, rather than cutting and pasting from my copy of the docs to the email, I just inform the luser that he's violated the terms of the license.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Intel slap them down?

On: Rambus to Attempt to Collect Royalties on Chipsets

Don't be absurd. They own part of the company.

Besides, Intel's lawyers are great big boys and girls who want what's best for Intel. And what's best for Intel? How about stopping AMD's surge in market share until they get the P4 working?

Given that, here's how the scenario plays out
[puts on Great Karnak turban]

• Rambus sues Intel and a dozen other board makers.
• They settle their lawsuit with Intel for fifty cents.
• They take everybody else to court or settle for millions.
• Intel keeps its cash. Everybody else is short of cash.
• Intel finally gets a P4 out of their fabs that isn't broken.
• Intel leverages its cash to build Threldor, King of Fabs.
• Intel leverages the rest of its cash to go after market share by selling under cost.

And then Intel swats Rambus like a fly.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Free censorware

On: SmartFilter's Greatest Evils

Every dollar, pound, franc, mark and shekel currently spent on censorware goes to support (a) individuals whose values most of us find despicable (b) the operating expenses of companies composed of such individuals, or (c) people who invest in such companies.

None of us should be the tiniest bit surprised that censorware routinely blocks organizations that promote free inquiry, free speech, and free access to knowledge. Of course it blocks sites like that. The values inherent in those sites are anathema to the values of people who write censorware. You couldn't conceivably code, sell, or even lick stamps for a censorware company if you didn't support the values behind censorware and despise the values we happen to cherish.

Are you shocked that censorware blocks sites of people who hate censors and censorware? Don't be. The people who run censorware companies hate them (you) right back.

Nor should we be surprised at the seeming stupidity of censorware. Dullness, to a censor, is a virtue. What is a person who deliberately shuts out massive portions of life and thought (and strives to make others the same) but dull?

Here on /., the consensus seems to be that parents should control what their minor children see and that adults (however you define it for your own situation) should be mildly shielded from going to sites they'll find annoying or disturbing. Opinions are divided on whether libraries and corporations should have similar control over their employees, but I believe nearly unanimous that censorware, if it has to be used, should be free from gross stupidities.

Which is why I think a few of us ought to get together to cut the censorware companies off at the knees by developing Free Software censorware that embodies our values: intelligence and choice.

Want to shield your kids or yourself from corporate music sites? No problem. It's an option. Want to block out banner ads? Ditto. WebWasher just hasn't gone far enough.

What's more, Free Software censorware would almost certainly be higher quality than what's out there now.

And it would surely go toward our real karma if we could take away from people like that the two things they prize the most: money and control over other people.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

It's not altruism, it's culling

On: Scour is Dead

The reason Gnutella, Scour, and the like were born doomed isn't that people aren't altruistic. Enough of them are -- let's remember that a tiny handful of people responding has kept spam alive all these years. For every 100 greedy Republicans who take but never give, there's one Naderite who opens up a whole pile of files. Even one altruist in 1000 would be enough, given a sensible number of people on the air.

The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.

I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.

A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said, then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.

The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.

An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.

(I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)

And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.

While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

It's the courts, stupid

On: Should You Vote?

When it comes down to whether we continue our headlong rush to become a government of, by, and for the biggest corporations or start valuing individual rights against corporate encroachment, it's the courts who'll make the decisions that affect us day in and day out.

Remember, even a "centrist" Republican, Nixon, appointed Rehnquist, a man who never saw a big business he didn't like (unless they were in litigation against an even bigger business). This embrace of corporatism, not the Bible-thumpers, is the real soul of Republicanism.

For me, it's not so much a vote for Gore as it is a sure-fire vote against more Republican/corporate judges and Justices.

3D won't succeed until it's ubiquitous

On: A New Chance For 3D On The Web?

No, that isn't circular. Let me explain.

The golden era of VRML was when Netscape was the number one Web browser and Netscape's own VRML browser Live3D (nee WebFX, became Cosmo Player) was included in the Netscape bundle most people downloaded.

But within 6 months it had become clear that Netscape itself had gotten so big (and Cosmo Player and the others had gotten so big) that bundling the two together gave an unacceptably large download. And so, VRML browsers were unbundled.

Add in some serious Netscape bugs that grievously affected VRML browsers but didn't affect HTML page viewing much (and therefore were low priority on Netscape's fix list) and some absurd hopefulness that Ma and Pa Kettle wouldn't mind installing a plugin that (briefly) was regarded as being as easy to install as a DOS game, and the mindshare was lost.

And because VRML worlds weren't exactly ubiquitous themselves (building 3D is hard -- building effective 3D is real hard), a substantial number of people upgraded their Netscape installation (or replaced it with a MSIE installation) without ever knowing that they used to have built in VRML browsing capability and didn't any more.

This was the occasion for the first of what have become regular biennial events: The Death of VRML (film at 11).

X3D (sorta aka VRML 2001) is intended to break the ubiquity barrier. Trouble is, XML, on which it's based, is gaining mindshare at a pace that can optimistically be called glacial. Hell, how many web sites even have style sheets, for chrissakes?

VRML has got a couple of niches now. One of them, the "3D community" niche is a pretty big one -- three quarters of a million people have visited Cybertown long enough to sign up as members and a good percentage of them participate in the full 3D experience (informal observation). But in comparison to the 2D web, that's chicken feed.

An application that I think is really going to take off in another niche is Geo VRML where 3D geodata can be used to immeasurably improve the "you are there" experience of maps. Again, a niche, although it's one I'm personally excited about.

And there have been some other really brilliant applications of 3D on the Web that together make up a third niche. You can find a number of them on my site and on about.com -- Sandy's links are better maintained than mine. Let's call that niche "hardcore 3Dheads", among whom I number myself.

But in order for 3D to break out of those niches, it's got to be on every desktop. Huge plugins or controls to download and add to an already bloated Web browser won't do it.

Nor will a new and improved standard or pseudostandard for 3D on the Web. VRML 97 has got plenty of headroom. Not one 3D world in 20 uses the simple but (if I do say so myself) fairly effective color, lighting, and animation tricks in this dolphin, for example.

But until there's a way to get 3D into everybody's Web browser, or using some other means onto everybody's desktop, I'm not optimistic about the future of 3D on the web.

"The price of a new PC?"

On: Rijndael Picked for AES

As a tool, code for the new AES algorithm is less than 10,000 bytes, and thus cryptography slips into the average application with less implication on costs than the price of a new PC.

wtf?

Naughty, naughty, Cmdr. Taco

On: Slashdot Database Compromised!

You might have picked a better place for it than http://slashdot.org/phpMyAdmin/

Politics is interesting

On: The Last Days Of Politics

...the way that, on a two-lane road, a cement truck that's coming toward me and has just pulled into my lane is interesting.

So long as governments have the right to take away my property, my liberty, and even my life, participation in politics -- not only voting myself, but convincing others to vote as I do -- is not an option, it's a necessity.

Re:What is the big deal with getting 1st post?

On: Justin Frankel of Nullsoft Hacks AIM

If ya didn't want grits, wha'd you order breakfast for?