I started playing with computers in 6th grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Pascal, and had quite a bit of programming experience.
But I lacked any theoretical framework.
College changed that. It gave me the big picture. I could see not only how things worked, but why they worked that way.
Of course, I also learned a bunch of new languages, and was exposed to new OS environments, but I would have picked those up on my own eventually. I don't think I can say the same of the theoretical understanding.
I started playing with computers in 6th grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Pascal, and had quite a bit of programming experience.
But I lacked any theoretical framework.
College changed that. It gave me the big picture. I could see not only how things worked, but why they worked that way.
Of course, I also learned a bunch of new languages, and was exposed to new OS environments, but I would have picked those up on my own eventually. I don't think I can say the same of the theoretical understanding.
The RIAA was denied a temporary injunction against Diamond, but the case isn't over, last I heard.
A temporary injuction is awarded based on a quick preliminary injunction if the judge is convinced that a permanent injunction is likely following the trial. (I'm not sure how strongly the judge has to be convinced, but the idea is to prevent additional dammages while the suit is being argued.)
Hence, the RIAA failed to convince the court in their initial briefs and hearing that they would win, so no temporary injunction was issued.
Of course, a temporary injunction or the lack thereof can often persuade people to settle. If that happened here, I missed it.
I think the media defines death of MP3 as the lack of support from any major consumer electronics companies. These companies may manage to institute some alternate RIAA-friendly format for consumer electronics, but they won't stop people from using MP3 in computers or devices from small companies.
Seriously, there are people talking about doing this, either intentionally, or as a side effect of another project.
One group is working on replacing the standard GNU tools with BSD equivalents (and using egcs instead of gcc, which is, IMHO, quite a stretch). I think this one is a reaction the GNU/Linux naming.
A group of Perl worshipers are rewriting the Unix command set in Perl. Their system would ultimately be at least mostly FSF-free.
I expect someone will follow up this with links to the projects I mentioned (which I probably read about here, anyway).
We'll have Monterey, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and BSD.
The corporate giants will do all they can to hang on to the Unix market, and providing a more unified front against NT and Linux is just another step along the way.
They have to have the music stored in a way that prevents copying. If you put it in an existing standard format, anyone can use existing tools to copy the data.
Now I have no idea how they'll prevent copying, anyway, but using a closed architecture for storage is one move in that direction.
The memory stick is a marketing move by Sony to try to lock in control of the flash memory for consumer products market. This is a market with huge potential growth over the next few years, so it is only to be expected that a consumer electronics giant like Sony would want to push consumers towards a version that they control.
Sure, they might license it to other companies, but they'll get royalties.
I thought the last DIVX story here stated that Circuit City said they would fund DIVX for another year, but needed additional partners to keep it going beyond that. This report is more an analysis of how DIVX is confusing for investors.
I see nothing here to indicate that Circuit City is about to dump DIVX anytime this year.
You can't bypass the Divx phone call because they use strong encryption on the disks. In theory, if the phone protocol were reverse engineered, we could set up a Linux system to phone in, pretending to be a Divx player, and get the encryption key for *that disk*.
Then you could play that one disk all you wanted.
Most likely all Divx disks for a given movie use the same encryption--I can't see them independently burning every single disk. Hence, it would be possible to create a database of Divx encryption keys. Of course, such a database would be in violation of US copyright law. (I think they ran though the provision that makes it illegal to bypass copy protection schemes.)
Personally, I'm much more interested in seeing Linux able to play ordinary DVDs. Doesn't Alan Cox need a DVD-ROM drive...?
So now that they've defined how y10k dates are supposed to work, how long until we can have liby10k for Linux? This would be useful for converting y10k dates into traditional formats and back.
This looks like they took the document that describes the RFC process and did a search and replace to change "Internet" to "Roman." They also changed all numbers to use Roman numerals.
Not terribly funny. The others look more promising.
That virtual tour of an abandoned silo is clearly written as a warning not to sneak into one as they did. They pointed out that there is tons of asbestos in the place, rumors of dioxins, and a good chance of radon if it isn't flooded.
I wonder how clean the one that they've converted into a house is?
It looks from what I can follow of the tour that the silo they were in was a significantly larger complex. That makes me wonder if there are other parts of the original complex that have been sealed off instead of being cleaned up?
I used DR-DOS 6 with drive compression, and it ate my drive for lunch when doing the defrag. My guess is that it didn't like that I had to use Ontrak Disk Manager since my BIOS didn't support my 60M RLL drive.
I wish I had known to install Linux on that 386.
What to do with the silo space?
on
Nerd Dream Home?
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· Score: 1
SILO
CLIMATE CONSTANT/ APPROX. 58 DEGREE EARTH AMBIENT TEMPERATURE. 52' DIAMETER X 178' DEEP / 9 FLOOR STEEL SUPERSTRUCTURE. ENTIRE STEEL SUPERSTRUCTURE HANGS FROM GIGANTIC SPRING SUSPENSION SYSTEM DESIGNED TO ABSORB SHOCK OF A DIRECT NUCLEAR HIT. UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES!!!
So what would you do with such a place?
It sounds cool, but I don't see how I would make use of it.
OTOH, there are those who argue that the government's actions interfere with the "natural order of things" in free markets.
That's an anarchist view of free markets, as sometimes advocated by Libertarians. I prefer the more traditional Conservative/Republican view (granted, the association of an economic model with a political party is a subjective generalization):
The role of government in the free market is to keep the market free. Government steps in when supply and demand are unable to function, due to fraud, abuse of monopoly power, and such. While the free market may legitimately create a monopoly, that monopoly may use its position to prevent new competitors from emerging, despite market conditions that under other circumstances would encourage new competitors.
So with that philosophy, government should step in and stop Microsoft's exclusive licensing practices, and probably prohibit unequal OEM licensing deals. Maybe they should do something about product integration (DOS/Windows and Browser/Windows), but that's less clear. Additional action might be appropriate to repair past damages, for punative purposes, or to prevent future abuses.
Linux was born in 1991 by a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland whose first name, Linus, led to the naming of the language.
Linux is a language? Oh, yeah, I seem to remember that from another article, perhaps from ZD. And references to the "GNU Foundation" are annoying, but not so bad.
Still, I find the ideas interesting. The basic premise is that the battle between free software/standards and proprietary software/closed formats is related to a corresponding issue of control between the government and private companies.
Interesting, though I disagree.
Government funded open software and the Internet because it was an interesting science project, and private industry didn't see enough short-term profits to do it. Once the profits came into view, government was no longer relavent, and for once, it stepped out of the way, instead of into the way.
The warning could also ask for permission for/. to make a mirrored copy available. Then if they feel overwhelmed, all they have to do is tell/. to mirror it (/. would save a private copy before posting).
It could even be/. policy to change the link in the story to the mirrored copy.
And to be nice to the site, the mirrored copy, if HTML, could use the BASE headder tag to leave all the other links active for those interested in exploring the site.
Microsoft, like most high tech companies, does not pay a dividend to shareholders. Modern investors generally prefer that extra cash be used in stock buy-backs, so as to have a similar effect on the total value, only taxed as capital gains, not income. (Intel pays a tiny token dividend for the sake of "income" mutual funds that only invest in stocks with dividends.)
Disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft, though I recently wiped my DOS partition off of my primary computer. The only user-friendly bug-free product that Microsoft makes is its stock.
I didn't follow exactly the translation between various products and divisions. Where would each of the following go: Windows 98 Internet Explorer Office Windows NT Hardware (keyboards, mice, speakers, etc.)
I would think that Win98 and Internet Explorer would be the same division, since they are the same product.:) I guess that shoots down my idea that the court might break up the company along the lines Microsoft has just drawn.
Organizations reorganize all the time. It's just a matter of selecting what portions of the company each VP is in charge of. Sometimes it involves consolidations and layoffs (though probably not in this case).
However, with the pending anti-trust case, this reorganization is viewed in a different light, and with good reason. The impression that many people have is that Microsoft is defining a logical partitioning of the company in preparation for a court-ordered breakup. The idea is that if the court orders such a move, it would likely try to split the company along pre-existing boundaries within the company. Microsoft just changed those boundaries.
So unless the court decides that two aspects of a single Microsoft division must be split up, any split will probably be done along the lines that Microsoft has just laid out.
Any new software release may contain major bugs that the developers missed. If you really need a stable system, don't upgrade to the latest release until it has had time for the bugs to settle out. Sure, the developers try to make every release bug free, but they're only demi-gods (i.e., only mostly perfect).
Fortunately, for Linux, this means wait a few days, possibly a week.
Of course, many of us don't need absolute perfectly stable systems. Hence, we're free to upgrade the moment the latest compiler, kernel, or whatever hits the mirrors, and we just might be the ones to find the brown-paper-bag issue that the developers need to know about. In other words, running a brand new software release and looking for problems is one thing that non-programmers can do to help the free software community.
Slashdot Mirror
I started playing with computers in 6th grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Pascal, and had quite a bit of programming experience.
But I lacked any theoretical framework.
College changed that. It gave me the big picture. I could see not only how things worked, but why they worked that way.
Of course, I also learned a bunch of new languages, and was exposed to new OS environments, but I would have picked those up on my own eventually. I don't think I can say the same of the theoretical understanding.
I started playing with computers in 6th grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Pascal, and had quite a bit of programming experience.
But I lacked any theoretical framework.
College changed that. It gave me the big picture. I could see not only how things worked, but why they worked that way.
Of course, I also learned a bunch of new languages, and was exposed to new OS environments, but I would have picked those up on my own eventually. I don't think I can say the same of the theoretical understanding.
The RIAA was denied a temporary injunction against Diamond, but the case isn't over, last I heard.
A temporary injuction is awarded based on a quick preliminary injunction if the judge is convinced that a permanent injunction is likely following the trial. (I'm not sure how strongly the judge has to be convinced, but the idea is to prevent additional dammages while the suit is being argued.)
Hence, the RIAA failed to convince the court in their initial briefs and hearing that they would win, so no temporary injunction was issued.
Of course, a temporary injunction or the lack thereof can often persuade people to settle. If that happened here, I missed it.
I think the media defines death of MP3 as the lack of support from any major consumer electronics companies. These companies may manage to institute some alternate RIAA-friendly format for consumer electronics, but they won't stop people from using MP3 in computers or devices from small companies.
Seriously, there are people talking about doing this, either intentionally, or as a side effect of another project.
One group is working on replacing the standard GNU tools with BSD equivalents (and using egcs instead of gcc, which is, IMHO, quite a stretch). I think this one is a reaction the GNU/Linux naming.
A group of Perl worshipers are rewriting the Unix command set in Perl. Their system would ultimately be at least mostly FSF-free.
I expect someone will follow up this with links to the projects I mentioned (which I probably read about here, anyway).
Compaq may be joining the project, but they aren't dumping their existing product.
In fact, they just announced today that Tru64 UNIX runs on simulated Merced chips. The press release hasn't hit their web page yet, though.
So the number of separate Unixes is decreasing.
We'll have Monterey, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and BSD.
The corporate giants will do all they can to hang on to the Unix market, and providing a more unified front against NT and Linux is just another step along the way.
They have to have the music stored in a way that prevents copying. If you put it in an existing standard format, anyone can use existing tools to copy the data.
Now I have no idea how they'll prevent copying, anyway, but using a closed architecture for storage is one move in that direction.
The memory stick is a marketing move by Sony to try to lock in control of the flash memory for consumer products market. This is a market with huge potential growth over the next few years, so it is only to be expected that a consumer electronics giant like Sony would want to push consumers towards a version that they control.
Sure, they might license it to other companies, but they'll get royalties.
I thought the PII only supported 2-way SMP.
I was reading that SMP Celeron page, and based on what I learned about SMP there, it seems that the PII is only 2-way by design.
True, some ugly hardware hacks on the motherboard could overcome that, but the performance would likely be less than wonderful.
I thought the last DIVX story here stated that Circuit City said they would fund DIVX for another year, but needed additional partners to keep it going beyond that. This report is more an analysis of how DIVX is confusing for investors.
I see nothing here to indicate that Circuit City is about to dump DIVX anytime this year.
Too bad.
You can't bypass the Divx phone call because they use strong encryption on the disks. In theory, if the phone protocol were reverse engineered, we could set up a Linux system to phone in, pretending to be a Divx player, and get the encryption key for *that disk*.
Then you could play that one disk all you wanted.
Most likely all Divx disks for a given movie use the same encryption--I can't see them independently burning every single disk. Hence, it would be possible to create a database of Divx encryption keys. Of course, such a database would be in violation of US copyright law. (I think they ran though the provision that makes it illegal to bypass copy protection schemes.)
Personally, I'm much more interested in seeing Linux able to play ordinary DVDs. Doesn't Alan Cox need a DVD-ROM drive...?
So now that they've defined how y10k dates are supposed to work, how long until we can have liby10k for Linux? This would be useful for converting y10k dates into traditional formats and back.
This looks like they took the document that describes the RFC process and did a search and replace to change "Internet" to "Roman." They also changed all numbers to use Roman numerals.
Not terribly funny. The others look more promising.
Note that while the distribution supports iMacs, they state that their installer does not work, but an update will be "available soon."
Check out their list of supported hardware for more details.
That virtual tour of an abandoned silo is clearly written as a warning not to sneak into one as they did. They pointed out that there is tons of asbestos in the place, rumors of dioxins, and a good chance of radon if it isn't flooded.
I wonder how clean the one that they've converted into a house is?
It looks from what I can follow of the tour that the silo they were in was a significantly larger complex. That makes me wonder if there are other parts of the original complex that have been sealed off instead of being cleaned up?
Hmmm.
I used DR-DOS 6 with drive compression, and it ate my drive for lunch when doing the defrag. My guess is that it didn't like that I had to use Ontrak Disk Manager since my BIOS didn't support my 60M RLL drive.
I wish I had known to install Linux on that 386.
SILO
CLIMATE CONSTANT/ APPROX. 58 DEGREE EARTH AMBIENT TEMPERATURE. 52' DIAMETER X 178' DEEP / 9 FLOOR STEEL SUPERSTRUCTURE. ENTIRE STEEL SUPERSTRUCTURE HANGS FROM GIGANTIC SPRING SUSPENSION SYSTEM DESIGNED TO ABSORB SHOCK OF A DIRECT NUCLEAR HIT. UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES!!!
So what would you do with such a place?
It sounds cool, but I don't see how I would make use of it.
This is starting to wander off topic a bit...
OTOH, there are those who argue that the government's actions interfere with the "natural order of things" in free markets.
That's an anarchist view of free markets, as sometimes advocated by Libertarians. I prefer the more traditional Conservative/Republican view (granted, the association of an economic model with a political party is a subjective generalization):
The role of government in the free market is to keep the market free. Government steps in when supply and demand are unable to function, due to fraud, abuse of monopoly power, and such. While the free market may legitimately create a monopoly, that monopoly may use its position to prevent new competitors from emerging, despite market conditions that under other circumstances would encourage new competitors.
So with that philosophy, government should step in and stop Microsoft's exclusive licensing practices, and probably prohibit unequal OEM licensing deals. Maybe they should do something about product integration (DOS/Windows and Browser/Windows), but that's less clear. Additional action might be appropriate to repair past damages, for punative purposes, or to prevent future abuses.
That's how I see it.
Linux was born in 1991 by a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland whose first name, Linus, led to the naming of the language.
Linux is a language? Oh, yeah, I seem to remember that from another article, perhaps from ZD. And references to the "GNU Foundation" are annoying, but not so bad.
Still, I find the ideas interesting. The basic premise is that the battle between free software/standards and proprietary software/closed formats is related to a corresponding issue of control between the government and private companies.
Interesting, though I disagree.
Government funded open software and the Internet because it was an interesting science project, and private industry didn't see enough short-term profits to do it. Once the profits came into view, government was no longer relavent, and for once, it stepped out of the way, instead of into the way.
The warning could also ask for permission for /. to make a mirrored copy available. Then if they feel overwhelmed, all they have to do is tell /. to mirror it (/. would save a private copy before posting).
/. policy to change the link in the story to the mirrored copy.
It could even be
And to be nice to the site, the mirrored copy, if HTML, could use the BASE headder tag to leave all the other links active for those interested in exploring the site.
Minor nitpick:
Microsoft, like most high tech companies, does not pay a dividend to shareholders. Modern investors generally prefer that extra cash be used in stock buy-backs, so as to have a similar effect on the total value, only taxed as capital gains, not income. (Intel pays a tiny token dividend for the sake of "income" mutual funds that only invest in stocks with dividends.)
Disclosure: I own stock in Microsoft, though I recently wiped my DOS partition off of my primary computer. The only user-friendly bug-free product that Microsoft makes is its stock.
I didn't follow exactly the translation between various products and divisions. Where would each of the following go:
:) I guess that shoots down my idea that the court might break up the company along the lines Microsoft has just drawn.
Windows 98
Internet Explorer
Office
Windows NT
Hardware (keyboards, mice, speakers, etc.)
I would think that Win98 and Internet Explorer would be the same division, since they are the same product.
Organizations reorganize all the time. It's just a matter of selecting what portions of the company each VP is in charge of. Sometimes it involves consolidations and layoffs (though probably not in this case).
However, with the pending anti-trust case, this reorganization is viewed in a different light, and with good reason. The impression that many people have is that Microsoft is defining a logical partitioning of the company in preparation for a court-ordered breakup. The idea is that if the court orders such a move, it would likely try to split the company along pre-existing boundaries within the company. Microsoft just changed those boundaries.
So unless the court decides that two aspects of a single Microsoft division must be split up, any split will probably be done along the lines that Microsoft has just laid out.
The lesson here is quite simple:
Any new software release may contain major bugs that the developers missed. If you really need a stable system, don't upgrade to the latest release until it has had time for the bugs to settle out. Sure, the developers try to make every release bug free, but they're only demi-gods (i.e., only mostly perfect).
Fortunately, for Linux, this means wait a few days, possibly a week.
Of course, many of us don't need absolute perfectly stable systems. Hence, we're free to upgrade the moment the latest compiler, kernel, or whatever hits the mirrors, and we just might be the ones to find the brown-paper-bag issue that the developers need to know about. In other words, running a brand new software release and looking for problems is one thing that non-programmers can do to help the free software community.