Well, open cores certainly are of some use. For one thing, they lower the barrier to entry to a new company with some capital and some good ideas about how to expand an existing design. Just look at http://opencores.org/ for examples of companies that have actually fabbed chips using their cores!!!
No, they don't yet make it possible for me to churn out SPARC chips in my basement. But I work in academic electronics research, and I've recently seen a talk on a machine that can be used to print (medium-scale) integrated circuits with an inkjet-like process. It costs $100k currently.
Anyone doing a real chip design, however, can afford to pay for a real supported core.
I remember reading ~1992 that anyone doing real software development could afford to pay for a real supported compiler. They were downplaying the benefit of GCC and the other GNU tools. Well as hardware has gotten cheaper and faster and the Internet has expanded and more people have gotten tech-savvy, guess what? Lots of people are doing *REAL* software development with FLOSS software tools.
Back when you needed $10000 worth of hardware + OS licenses etc. to make software development feasible, paying $300 for a compiler was no biggie. But now you can get an awesome complete workstation for $600 and even the $100 Microsoft OS tax starts to seem like a pretty crappy deal.
I imagine that hardware design will increasingly go the same way. Obviously, there are a lot more hurdles to go before we'll be fabbing chips in our basements. But I work in electronics research in a physics department, and people are doing amazing stuff like printing integrated circuits with inkjet printers... commercial equipment to do that is now selling for $100k.
Yes, that's a very good point. It would be nice if it was possible to throttle other resources in a uniform fashion.
With network bandwidth it's quite application-specific. For example I can tell Azureus (uber-featureful bittorrent client) to only use a certain amount of upload bandwidth. But I can't do this with Gaim, and when I'm sending someone a big file too fast, my web browsing grinds to a halt. It'd be handy to have a uniform way to restrict the bandwidth of apps.
Storage device accesses would be a LOT trickier IMHO. Without knowing the specifics of the device geometry and seek times etc., it's very hard to know how much of a drive's capacity is being used. As I suggested above, it's efficient to have one program read a DVD start-to-finish as fast as it can. It's *HORRIBLY* *AWFULLY* inneficient for TWO programs to do so at once (and from the sound of it, I worry that it will literally break my DVD drive:-)
Actually, I don't play FPS games, which are too confusing and fast for me. I occasionally play stategy games or old Nintendo platform games. I guess I'm just the freak on slashdot. *shrug*
Now here's a fun thing to do: rip a DVD with several programs at once, all at nice -19 at you suggest, and encode it to XVid and DivX and Theora all at once for good measure.
Watch the DVD drive churn and seek and gasp! Watch the encoders fight for CPU time with top open in a terminal window! Run some unnecessary I/O-bound process like updatedb in the background so that the hard drive can get in on the thrashing!
I'll second you about Dapper boot time being a great improvement over Breezy. I also have turned off the boot-time NTP sync, as that always introduces a delay.
I keep my laptop off when not in use, since I like to conserve electricity, but my desktop seems to be up all the time these days since I never know when I'll need to remote-access it.
In my opinion, the combination of Debian+Ubuntu is simply "the best" right now. I went from Debian to Ubuntu on my laptop about a year ago, and recently installed Ubuntu on my new AMD64 box.
Ubuntu is very stable, installed *almost* flawlessly (NVidia:-/) on my new AMD64 box, and best of all it's based on Debian. Also, they take a principled stand (IMHO) against closed-source software, but are more pragmatic in terms of offering closed-source packages while alternatives are developed.
Plus, Ubuntu and Debian devs interact a lot as far as I can tell, so Ubuntu is contributing to the improvement of Debian to a significant degree.
The way I see it: * Debian is a super-stable FLOSS-only server OS * Ubuntu is its almost-as-stable up-to-the-minute desktop OS
Neither of them is "the best" alone, but the combined strengths of the two are a knockout in my opinion.
Bingo. I hate being forced to watch previews every time I pop a DVD in. That's simply intolerable. I like being able to go through the navigation menus when I want to, and skip them when I know my way around the DVD. I like Linux because I never care about what region my DVD is for, since libdvdcss just "does the right thing".
I must disagree with you. I'm very fond of Ubuntu. And I'm not a noob either. Been using Linux since '94... Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, then Debian, now Ubuntu. I dunno what Mandrake is like these days, but when I gave it up it was dependency hell and there were so many buggy, broken packages in the stable distribution.
I consider myself a power user, do a lot of coding, live in emacs, etc. I really appreciate the attention to detail of Ubuntu. It seems to be the best of all worlds to me:
Excellent hardware support and easy as pie installation. I didn't mind wading IRQs and config files back in the Slackware days, but I can't say I miss it either.
Two words: apt get
A coherent collection of stable software with fast turnaround time. I'm running the latest unstable version of Ubuntu, and yet everything works great
Most importantly, Ubuntu feels like it has fewer "rough edges" than any other Linux distro I've ever used. The attention to detail is fabulous. For example, the first user account you have when you install it belongs to an "admin" group, allowing you to read logs and sudo automatically. The default GNOME theme is distinctive but pleasing. The web site is easy to navigate. The default installation includes almost exactly the right amount of software. The installer never seems to barf, even on odd hardware. Etc...
I don't even understand how they manage to *write* third-party patches. I mean, it must be hard as hell to do without the IE source code. I think they write a separate DLL which acts as an intermediary to the flawed insecure library or something, but it sounds like an enormous pain-in-the-ass process. Or do these companies have access to MS code through Shared Source program or something?
Yep, the more I watch the ills that befall the Microsoft-bound, the more I'm happy with my decision to go Linux-only a few years back.
C's still a good language that every programmer should know, IMHO, but there's too much mucking about with low-level stuff I think. Python's got a fabulous combination of simple syntax, elegant design, and power that is great for beginners.
If TiVo and cell phones were built on a truly open architecture, this service would be free... someone would write a couple of 100-line apps, one on the phone and one on the TiVo, and they'd be open source.
Just as we'd have had caller ID in 1970 if POTS was an open network architecture.
If they plan to hand the card off to another suicide-bomber-in-training who will assume their identity.
Lots of ridiculously innocuous-seeming transactions could be used for similarly nefarious purposes. The financial details of the transaction often don't fully clarify its purpose, that's why DHS has to sometimes go knock on doors and send letters demanding explanations. Not that I would like it, but I don't like suicide bombers much either.
Actually, paying off your credit card *could* be used for money laundering. For example:
Suppose I am a drug dealer. I use my credit card to buy $6500 worth of plastic baggies, but never more than $200 at a time, and over a period of 2 years. So now I'm $6500 in debt. Then I sell all the drugs on the street, and deposit the cash into my checking account, but never more than $50 at I time. Finally, I send the credit card company a check for $6500. BINGO! Now it seems like I haven't gained anything (because I've just given money AWAY to the CC company). But I *have* gained something, I've improved my credit so that I can buy drug-dealing supplies again.
The problem with money laundering is that practically any transfer of money can be used, so in order to effectively fight it, the government has to look at amounts and patterns of behavior, rather than who the recipient is and who appears to actually be benefiting from the transaction. It's unfortunate, but inevitable, that there are some retarded cases of innocent people being hassled like in TFA.
Fast user switching is a great feature to have... I wonder how it's implemented actually. The old way of starting a new X server was incredibly slow and annoying and switching back and forth wasn't intuitive.
Now I can make my girlfriend a separate account on my computer that won't be a pain to switch to. Woohoo!
First of all, when you guys outside the PRC find out some way to get around the censors, you should shut the fuck up about it...because we already know. Chinese net users are EXTREMELY savvy about this because we USE IT EVERY DAY. You're finding out AFTER we do, so please, shut up so you don't increase the chances that a given method are disrupted by the censors. You are NOT HELPING.
I understand you're frustration, but I'm not sure what the solution is.
First of all, how are Americans and others in the West supposed to support efforts to bypass Chinese Internet censorship, if we can't discuss it on the Internet? It might be that we don't have the right mindset since we're not used to Internet censorship with active, frequent government intervention. Do you have any suggestions on how we can support you guys without undermining you?
Secondly, you think it's very easy to get around the Great Firewall. But, clearly, you're tech-savvy and fluent in English. Do you think it's that easy for the Average Joe / Average Zhang in China?
Cool! I've heard that SSH tunneled proxies are the easiest way to get past the Great Firewall... Though it takes a bit of know-how and a shell account somewhere else to use it.
My understanding is that the Great Firewall is spotty enough not to pose a serious technical threat to knowledgeable computer users, but the fact that it's put in place by a capricious and brutally repressive government is certainly a deterrent. As is the fact that even simple page blocking is enough to deter most curious Chinese web surfers.
IMHO the solution would be to stop the censorship, not find other way around it.
Unfortunately, that doesn't usually work in countries ruled by repressive Communist regimes:-) That's why people take up dissident activities like subverting the Great Firewall.
Who says it's spam at all??? The article just says they use "spam like tactics" such as changing Vee-Oh-A to Vee-Zero-A to get around automatic censoring programs.
As far as I can tell, the article doesn't make clear whether the emails being sent out are unsolicited or not. Presumably, an organization like Voice of America would find that plenty of people in China would *want* to be on their mailing list... so that they can get news from something other than the official Communist-Party-approved sources.
This is great news, I think. I've often wondered when someone would start an agressive, concerted effort to bypass the Great Firewall of China. Having a native speaker of Chinese working on this is a big asset.
Props to Bill Xia and co! Sounds like his company is doing a lot to promote Internet freedom in China, and for all the right reasons.
Wasn't there a site called fuckedcompany.com? Sounds like that would be the place for your hypothetical company:-)
I can't believe these folks are worrying about the legal consequences of miscontruing the Linux license. Just imagine what would happen if they misuse a Microsoft Windows CE license. Hell hath no fury...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, open cores certainly are of some use. For one thing, they lower the barrier to entry to a new company with some capital and some good ideas about how to expand an existing design. Just look at http://opencores.org/ for examples of companies that have actually fabbed chips using their cores!!!
No, they don't yet make it possible for me to churn out SPARC chips in my basement. But I work in academic electronics research, and I've recently seen a talk on a machine that can be used to print (medium-scale) integrated circuits with an inkjet-like process. It costs $100k currently.
I remember reading ~1992 that anyone doing real software development could afford to pay for a real supported compiler. They were downplaying the benefit of GCC and the other GNU tools. Well as hardware has gotten cheaper and faster and the Internet has expanded and more people have gotten tech-savvy, guess what? Lots of people are doing *REAL* software development with FLOSS software tools.
Back when you needed $10000 worth of hardware + OS licenses etc. to make software development feasible, paying $300 for a compiler was no biggie. But now you can get an awesome complete workstation for $600 and even the $100 Microsoft OS tax starts to seem like a pretty crappy deal.
I imagine that hardware design will increasingly go the same way. Obviously, there are a lot more hurdles to go before we'll be fabbing chips in our basements. But I work in electronics research in a physics department, and people are doing amazing stuff like printing integrated circuits with inkjet printers... commercial equipment to do that is now selling for $100k.
Yes, that's a very good point. It would be nice if it was possible to throttle other resources in a uniform fashion.
:-)
With network bandwidth it's quite application-specific. For example I can tell Azureus (uber-featureful bittorrent client) to only use a certain amount of upload bandwidth. But I can't do this with Gaim, and when I'm sending someone a big file too fast, my web browsing grinds to a halt. It'd be handy to have a uniform way to restrict the bandwidth of apps.
Storage device accesses would be a LOT trickier IMHO. Without knowing the specifics of the device geometry and seek times etc., it's very hard to know how much of a drive's capacity is being used. As I suggested above, it's efficient to have one program read a DVD start-to-finish as fast as it can. It's *HORRIBLY* *AWFULLY* inneficient for TWO programs to do so at once (and from the sound of it, I worry that it will literally break my DVD drive
Actually, I don't play FPS games, which are too confusing and fast for me. I occasionally play stategy games or old Nintendo platform games. I guess I'm just the freak on slashdot. *shrug*
I agree completely. ... ...
WTF?
Now here's a fun thing to do: rip a DVD with several programs at once, all at nice -19 at you suggest, and encode it to XVid and DivX and Theora all at once for good measure.
Watch the DVD drive churn and seek and gasp!
Watch the encoders fight for CPU time with top open in a terminal window!
Run some unnecessary I/O-bound process like updatedb in the background so that the hard drive can get in on the thrashing!
Wheeee! What fun...
I'll second you about Dapper boot time being a great improvement over Breezy. I also have turned off the boot-time NTP sync, as that always introduces a delay.
I keep my laptop off when not in use, since I like to conserve electricity, but my desktop seems to be up all the time these days since I never know when I'll need to remote-access it.
In my opinion, the combination of Debian+Ubuntu is simply "the best" right now. I went from Debian to Ubuntu on my laptop about a year ago, and recently installed Ubuntu on my new AMD64 box.
:-/) on my new AMD64 box, and best of all it's based on Debian. Also, they take a principled stand (IMHO) against closed-source software, but are more pragmatic in terms of offering closed-source packages while alternatives are developed.
Ubuntu is very stable, installed *almost* flawlessly (NVidia
Plus, Ubuntu and Debian devs interact a lot as far as I can tell, so Ubuntu is contributing to the improvement of Debian to a significant degree.
The way I see it:
* Debian is a super-stable FLOSS-only server OS
* Ubuntu is its almost-as-stable up-to-the-minute desktop OS
Neither of them is "the best" alone, but the combined strengths of the two are a knockout in my opinion.
Bingo. I hate being forced to watch previews every time I pop a DVD in. That's simply intolerable. I like being able to go through the navigation menus when I want to, and skip them when I know my way around the DVD. I like Linux because I never care about what region my DVD is for, since libdvdcss just "does the right thing".
Oops, dead sig, I let my domain expire 2 months ago :-P Anyhoo, I've fixed the link in my sig!
But will they date /.'ers?
I consider myself a power user, do a lot of coding, live in emacs, etc. I really appreciate the attention to detail of Ubuntu. It seems to be the best of all worlds to me:
I don't even understand how they manage to *write* third-party patches. I mean, it must be hard as hell to do without the IE source code. I think they write a separate DLL which acts as an intermediary to the flawed insecure library or something, but it sounds like an enormous pain-in-the-ass process. Or do these companies have access to MS code through Shared Source program or something?
Yep, the more I watch the ills that befall the Microsoft-bound, the more I'm happy with my decision to go Linux-only a few years back.
Python! (I'm a recent convert from Perl myself)
C's still a good language that every programmer should know, IMHO, but there's too much mucking about with low-level stuff I think. Python's got a fabulous combination of simple syntax, elegant design, and power that is great for beginners.
If TiVo and cell phones were built on a truly open architecture, this service would be free... someone would write a couple of 100-line apps, one on the phone and one on the TiVo, and they'd be open source.
Just as we'd have had caller ID in 1970 if POTS was an open network architecture.
If they plan to hand the card off to another suicide-bomber-in-training who will assume their identity.
Lots of ridiculously innocuous-seeming transactions could be used for similarly nefarious purposes. The financial details of the transaction often don't fully clarify its purpose, that's why DHS has to sometimes go knock on doors and send letters demanding explanations. Not that I would like it, but I don't like suicide bombers much either.
The problem with money laundering is that practically any transfer of money can be used, so in order to effectively fight it, the government has to look at amounts and patterns of behavior, rather than who the recipient is and who appears to actually be benefiting from the transaction. It's unfortunate, but inevitable, that there are some retarded cases of innocent people being hassled like in TFA.
WMDs?
Fast user switching is a great feature to have... I wonder how it's implemented actually. The old way of starting a new X server was incredibly slow and annoying and switching back and forth wasn't intuitive.
Now I can make my girlfriend a separate account on my computer that won't be a pain to switch to. Woohoo!
I understand you're frustration, but I'm not sure what the solution is.
First of all, how are Americans and others in the West supposed to support efforts to bypass Chinese Internet censorship, if we can't discuss it on the Internet? It might be that we don't have the right mindset since we're not used to Internet censorship with active, frequent government intervention. Do you have any suggestions on how we can support you guys without undermining you?
Secondly, you think it's very easy to get around the Great Firewall. But, clearly, you're tech-savvy and fluent in English. Do you think it's that easy for the Average Joe / Average Zhang in China?
Cool! I've heard that SSH tunneled proxies are the easiest way to get past the Great Firewall... Though it takes a bit of know-how and a shell account somewhere else to use it.
My understanding is that the Great Firewall is spotty enough not to pose a serious technical threat to knowledgeable computer users, but the fact that it's put in place by a capricious and brutally repressive government is certainly a deterrent. As is the fact that even simple page blocking is enough to deter most curious Chinese web surfers.
Unfortunately, that doesn't usually work in countries ruled by repressive Communist regimes
Who says it's spam at all??? The article just says they use "spam like tactics" such as changing Vee-Oh-A to Vee-Zero-A to get around automatic censoring programs.
As far as I can tell, the article doesn't make clear whether the emails being sent out are unsolicited or not. Presumably, an organization like Voice of America would find that plenty of people in China would *want* to be on their mailing list... so that they can get news from something other than the official Communist-Party-approved sources.
This is great news, I think. I've often wondered when someone would start an agressive, concerted effort to bypass the Great Firewall of China. Having a native speaker of Chinese working on this is a big asset.
Props to Bill Xia and co! Sounds like his company is doing a lot to promote Internet freedom in China, and for all the right reasons.
Wasn't there a site called fuckedcompany.com? Sounds like that would be the place for your hypothetical company :-)
I can't believe these folks are worrying about the legal consequences of miscontruing the Linux license. Just imagine what would happen if they misuse a Microsoft Windows CE license. Hell hath no fury...