I agree with most of the latter part of what you said, but you have to admit that forking something like JavaVMs would be a little more problematic than forking something like a library, a compiler, or, say, Emacs. Those are used by one person. The dependency begins and ends with the user, but that isn't the case with Java. If the JavaVM is just a little bit broken, it's no good at all. As long as there were decent standards, it would be ok, but as we see with Web browsers, it's tempting to avoid standards. It's more akin to forking C than gcc. If I fork gcc to change C in an incompatible way (no matter how cool it is), we've got problems. If only there were ANSI Java!
The "binary-only glx driver" was really just the speculation of some people a little too pro-free-software for their own good. Matrox hasn't said anything to that effect, though they won't give the specs, so it'd have to be binary to use WARP. Seems like binary microcode (not the same as a binary driver) is the most likely release, but that's just me guessing too:)
The license on the SDK says you can't use it for that purpose. Also, Creative made 3dfx cards in the past. It's conceivable that they had the source to Glide, which would have made it much easier to make a wrapper (I suppose). I'm sure that would have been under an even more strict license than the SDK. But I doubt Creative was stupid enough to use tainted people to do it. I'm sure it had to be clean room. At least I sure hope so!
That's how things work now, only less organized. Someone starts a project they're interested in. If it's of great importance to a company, they throw money at it. See GNOME (Red Hat), WINE (Corel), etc. Take Alan Cox. I'm sure if he couldn't be writing for the kernel under someone's payroll and had to do something else, he'd probably write something for the kernel anyway, on the side. But he wouldn't be able to write as much. Red Hat (and SuSE, previously?) expedited the process. Having a better kernel is in their interest, so they sponsor him. Having people just suggest topics they're interested in isn't going to work. People can suggest topics that fall through, but every fledgling open-source project serves as proof-of-concept that's needed for this kind of system.
Another thing to remember is that Etrade is doing part of the release too (I guess since Goldman Sachs took them public; don't know why). Their rule is that if you've made 75 or more trades per year, you're "considered" for an IPO. Though with one like Red Hat, it might take a bit more.
Sorry about that. It seems like a stupid idea which could cause much more trouble than it's worth. I need to spend more time working and less time here.
I was in some computer stores recently, and I saw the official Red Hat 6.0 (nice box!) and next to it the MacMillan (I think it was them) boxed version of RH6.0. Now I have nothing against places like cheapbytes or linuxmall selling ~$3 versions of Red Hat, but that made me kind of mad that someone was selling for $35 what the original packagers had selling for $70 and which could be had for $3. Of course, they're in their rights to do this, but it seems kind of lame. Is there any license like GPL but not quite that would allow things like Mandrake to continue but not cheap knock-offs like MacMillan? I guess not, but it just seems like such a shame.
or did they allude to Slashdot as cheating? Oh well.
I don't know about that 8 tons of fuel per hour. For one thing, they gave no credentials for the guy giving the estimate--I estimate 4 tons, so there! Besides, if the people aren't using the HLT command, they're really not wasting anything (unless they're intentionally leaving their computers on longer than they otherwise would have; I don't put it past them). So they're really wasting nothing.
Re:So do we really need this?
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 2
The main draw is probably that they're free, but it's not the only draw. I have no pirated MP3s, but I have made them from all of my CDs because it's a lot more convenient that way. Same with the empeg. Just press play and you've got a continuous stream of all your music without changing or carrying CDs. And I'm no audiophile, so a slightly lower quality isn't going to bother me. Of course, I don't have $1000 to blow, so I'm not going to get this.
The general idea on/. (though not everyone holds this opinion, I'm sure) is that vague software patents are bad. A smaller subset believes all software patents are bad. This is not a vague software patent.
That's only because the ruling doesn't take effect immediately. I should have mentioned that. It said that people in rural areas would be able to keep the feed for a while but that people in cities would have to go off pretty soon.
Sorry, Mr. Taco, but you can't get networks unless you have an antenna. Sometime this winter the courts ruled against the major dish provider (I can't remember who that is; I have cable). They were providing the New York/Chicago/LA feeds of the major networks so people wouldn't have to use antennas. But someone sued and now they can't do that anymore. (I read about this in the Economist sometime in winter). So now they're stuck with subsidizing bunny ears. The article did mention that the great hope for dish providers is that most cable providers won't be ready for digital telivision, so they'll be able to create a box that has dish and HDTV reception in one, which should solve some of the problems.
But what can it tell us that Mir didn't? We already know a lot about long-term effects of microgravity. The cost of finding out what a year does as opposed to 8 months isn't worth that much money.
Why the space station, though? There is not one experiment to be done on the space station that couldn't be done reasonably well billions of dollars cheaper by an unmanned probe or in the space shuttle. Public support is a goood argument, I guess, but for that kind of cash NASA can do some serious PR! They could just buy commercials on "Channel 1" telling every middle school kid to be an astronaut instead of building the space station. It'd be cheaper, so they could have more unmanned probes and learn about stuff.
It's rather optimistic to think that we're at the point in human history where sending people into space is the main goal. Far from it! Where are we going to send them? We could send a few dozen people to the moon, but what good is that going to do us? No, we're better off waiting till we have something worthwhile, like at least go to Mars. And the unmannned missions are the best way to get us to where we can do that. Accomplishing the goals of the Pathfinder and Deep Space missions with manned expeditions would cost a lot, but these are the things we need to get somewhere useful.
The space station doesn't work yet; it's a big money-hole in the sky. They've given up on Mir now, too. The international space station is one of the few scientific endeavours I've seen scientists say is a waste of money.
What exactly has WB done that is wrong? They created a show with their money--a show they own the rights to--and decided not to publish it (at least for now). Since when is it wrong to censor yourself? I do it all the time (though you can't tell from some of the stupid things I've said on/.), and I'm sure most of us do it too. I know we all have those times when you think, "I could say something really, really inappropriate right now. I'm going to do it, really I am . . . no wait, that would make me look like a jerk." And then you stop yourself. Or when you have an otherwise really funny joke about snipers that you're about to tell, but then you realize, "Oh! Your husband was sniped, wasn't he? You probably didn't think that was very funny, did you? Get a sense of humor!" You can censor youself out of taste, and while external censorship has a tendancy to be ungood (I don't care if that's not a word!), it's often better to have too much self-censorship than not enough. Or maybe we don't think that way.
Um, "Based in San Diego, California, Verant Interactive has a staff of over 70 employees who consist of the development teams responsible for the online games Tanarus and EverQuest. "
You call macrovision "rather potent"?! For one thing, Macrovision deals with copying analog. It relies on the macrovision protection in VCRs. There's an invisible (to you), varying signal that comes from any output that has macrovision (basically any pre-recorded media has this) that tells your VCR (or MPEG encoder; these also have to have Macrovision protection) that what it's seeing is just noise. So it records noise, despite the fact that you're seeing a clean picture. This, however, has been disabled on so many systems that it only stops really lazy people (what it was meant to do, I guess).
Macrovision does have some different stuff for CD-ROMs that may actually be on DVDs for all I know (if you do, please correct me; that would overshadow the ineffectiveness of the previous paragraph's system). There's more to the CD-ROM than can be copied (how, I don't know). So when you make a copy, you're really not getting everything. If they did that with DVDs, it might do something.
To my knowledge, they're both encrypted. But it's not exporting the algorithms--it's the data, which there aren't any export restrictions on (well, there might be, but not because of that). And it's not that export is illegal; you just have to get a license. I would imagine Circuit City could get a license to export DIVX to Europe. They probably haven't applied because they're waiting till they get a foothold in the states (fat chance!)
There are two things going on, decoding and decryption. Looking at the linux dvd page (which has been down for about a week, from what I can tell), it seems they have support for reading the DVD file format. So you can put your 17GB DVD in there and read the data to your heart's content. They also have alpha support for decoding the data and playing a movie from it, even in hardware (which is more efficient, of course). But that doesn't mean you can play a movie. The DVD forum also put a lot of time into cryptography. Unlike copying VHS to VHS, which degrades things, copying DVD to DVD should result in a perfect copy. It's all digital, so bit-for-bit copies should be just as perfect as the original, which would make for some nasty piracy. So the DVD Forum put cryptography measures in ther. I have no idea how this works! But in order to build a DVD player, software or hardware, you have to sign an NDA with the DVD Forum saying they get your firstborn if you tell anyone about the decryption process (obviously it's not that good if they have to keep it secret; maybe they're just paranoid). Every other computer DVD solution does the decryption in software--it's just easier that way. But you can't release the source to any of this, because that would be a violation of the NDA. So these people are putting the cryptography stuff in hardware so they can still release the source to the player. So it's this or a closed-source solution for Linux DVD.
About the AGP: that's Intel's fault, not nVidia's. Intel won't release the specs for the GART interface on their chipsets. The other chipset manufacturers will, but that's just for Super7 chipsets, which is a minority of the market, making it more difficult to get something working.
I see your point, but I think a lot of people are missing the point:
Barring any deal to the contrary, it is "RedHat" which decides whether or not they go public.
It does not matter whether IBM would prefer stock or cash (though they can get a piece of the company even if it's not publically traded). It does not matter what the employees want. It does not matter what Linus wants. It doesn't matter what I want, though if anyone's listening, put the deed in the mail!
Whoever owns the company decides. IBM and AOL probably own a bit, though we don't know that. Young and the other founders probably own the rest. I don't know. We don't know. But whoever does own it decides, and whether or not they go public will be based on their self-interest (which could of course coincide with mine, Linus's, IBM's, and their employees' self-interests).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of the latter part of what you said, but you have to admit that forking something like JavaVMs would be a little more problematic than forking something like a library, a compiler, or, say, Emacs. Those are used by one person. The dependency begins and ends with the user, but that isn't the case with Java. If the JavaVM is just a little bit broken, it's no good at all. As long as there were decent standards, it would be ok, but as we see with Web browsers, it's tempting to avoid standards. It's more akin to forking C than gcc. If I fork gcc to change C in an incompatible way (no matter how cool it is), we've got problems. If only there were ANSI Java!
The "binary-only glx driver" was really just the speculation of some people a little too pro-free-software for their own good. Matrox hasn't said anything to that effect, though they won't give the specs, so it'd have to be binary to use WARP. Seems like binary microcode (not the same as a binary driver) is the most likely release, but that's just me guessing too :)
The license on the SDK says you can't use it for that purpose. Also, Creative made 3dfx cards in the past. It's conceivable that they had the source to Glide, which would have made it much easier to make a wrapper (I suppose). I'm sure that would have been under an even more strict license than the SDK. But I doubt Creative was stupid enough to use tainted people to do it. I'm sure it had to be clean room. At least I sure hope so!
That's how things work now, only less organized. Someone starts a project they're interested in. If it's of great importance to a company, they throw money at it. See GNOME (Red Hat), WINE (Corel), etc. Take Alan Cox. I'm sure if he couldn't be writing for the kernel under someone's payroll and had to do something else, he'd probably write something for the kernel anyway, on the side. But he wouldn't be able to write as much. Red Hat (and SuSE, previously?) expedited the process. Having a better kernel is in their interest, so they sponsor him. Having people just suggest topics they're interested in isn't going to work. People can suggest topics that fall through, but every fledgling open-source project serves as proof-of-concept that's needed for this kind of system.
Another thing to remember is that Etrade is doing part of the release too (I guess since Goldman Sachs took them public; don't know why). Their rule is that if you've made 75 or more trades per year, you're "considered" for an IPO. Though with one like Red Hat, it might take a bit more.
Sorry about that. It seems like a stupid idea which could cause much more trouble than it's worth. I need to spend more time working and less time here.
I was in some computer stores recently, and I saw the official Red Hat 6.0 (nice box!) and next to it the MacMillan (I think it was them) boxed version of RH6.0. Now I have nothing against places like cheapbytes or linuxmall selling ~$3 versions of Red Hat, but that made me kind of mad that someone was selling for $35 what the original packagers had selling for $70 and which could be had for $3. Of course, they're in their rights to do this, but it seems kind of lame. Is there any license like GPL but not quite that would allow things like Mandrake to continue but not cheap knock-offs like MacMillan? I guess not, but it just seems like such a shame.
Good point, but still, the majority of users are using a DOS-based OS, so the estimate is off. Don't blame me! I didn't cheat! I run distributed.net!
And I don't run HLT either. It does not like a Peltier. My CPU turned green and stopped working!
or did they allude to Slashdot as cheating? Oh well.
I don't know about that 8 tons of fuel per hour. For one thing, they gave no credentials for the guy giving the estimate--I estimate 4 tons, so there! Besides, if the people aren't using the HLT command, they're really not wasting anything (unless they're intentionally leaving their computers on longer than they otherwise would have; I don't put it past them). So they're really wasting nothing.
The main draw is probably that they're free, but it's not the only draw. I have no pirated MP3s, but I have made them from all of my CDs because it's a lot more convenient that way. Same with the empeg. Just press play and you've got a continuous stream of all your music without changing or carrying CDs. And I'm no audiophile, so a slightly lower quality isn't going to bother me. Of course, I don't have $1000 to blow, so I'm not going to get this.
Oh, I did not see you said "I know SW!=HW". My apologies! I thought you were a troll.
Someone does this every time . . .
/. (though not everyone holds this opinion, I'm sure) is that vague software patents are bad. A smaller subset believes all software patents are bad. This is not a vague software patent.
The general idea on
Oh, I stand corrected!
That's only because the ruling doesn't take effect immediately. I should have mentioned that. It said that people in rural areas would be able to keep the feed for a while but that people in cities would have to go off pretty soon.
Sorry, Mr. Taco, but you can't get networks unless you have an antenna. Sometime this winter the courts ruled against the major dish provider (I can't remember who that is; I have cable). They were providing the New York/Chicago/LA feeds of the major networks so people wouldn't have to use antennas. But someone sued and now they can't do that anymore. (I read about this in the Economist sometime in winter). So now they're stuck with subsidizing bunny ears. The article did mention that the great hope for dish providers is that most cable providers won't be ready for digital telivision, so they'll be able to create a box that has dish and HDTV reception in one, which should solve some of the problems.
But what can it tell us that Mir didn't? We already know a lot about long-term effects of microgravity. The cost of finding out what a year does as opposed to 8 months isn't worth that much money.
Why the space station, though? There is not one experiment to be done on the space station that couldn't be done reasonably well billions of dollars cheaper by an unmanned probe or in the space shuttle. Public support is a goood argument, I guess, but for that kind of cash NASA can do some serious PR! They could just buy commercials on "Channel 1" telling every middle school kid to be an astronaut instead of building the space station. It'd be cheaper, so they could have more unmanned probes and learn about stuff.
It's rather optimistic to think that we're at the point in human history where sending people into space is the main goal. Far from it! Where are we going to send them? We could send a few dozen people to the moon, but what good is that going to do us? No, we're better off waiting till we have something worthwhile, like at least go to Mars. And the unmannned missions are the best way to get us to where we can do that. Accomplishing the goals of the Pathfinder and Deep Space missions with manned expeditions would cost a lot, but these are the things we need to get somewhere useful.
The space station doesn't work yet; it's a big money-hole in the sky. They've given up on Mir now, too. The international space station is one of the few scientific endeavours I've seen scientists say is a waste of money.
What exactly has WB done that is wrong? They created a show with their money--a show they own the rights to--and decided not to publish it (at least for now). Since when is it wrong to censor yourself? I do it all the time (though you can't tell from some of the stupid things I've said on /.), and I'm sure most of us do it too. I know we all have those times when you think, "I could say something really, really inappropriate right now. I'm going to do it, really I am . . . no wait, that would make me look like a jerk." And then you stop yourself. Or when you have an otherwise really funny joke about snipers that you're about to tell, but then you realize, "Oh! Your husband was sniped, wasn't he? You probably didn't think that was very funny, did you? Get a sense of humor!" You can censor youself out of taste, and while external censorship has a tendancy to be ungood (I don't care if that's not a word!), it's often better to have too much self-censorship than not enough. Or maybe we don't think that way.
There, I changed it. Now it reflects your complaint :)
Um,
"Based in San Diego, California, Verant Interactive has a staff of over 70 employees who consist of the development teams responsible for the online games Tanarus and EverQuest. "
You call macrovision "rather potent"?! For one thing, Macrovision deals with copying analog. It relies on the macrovision protection in VCRs. There's an invisible (to you), varying signal that comes from any output that has macrovision (basically any pre-recorded media has this) that tells your VCR (or MPEG encoder; these also have to have Macrovision protection) that what it's seeing is just noise. So it records noise, despite the fact that you're seeing a clean picture. This, however, has been disabled on so many systems that it only stops really lazy people (what it was meant to do, I guess).
Macrovision does have some different stuff for CD-ROMs that may actually be on DVDs for all I know (if you do, please correct me; that would overshadow the ineffectiveness of the previous paragraph's system). There's more to the CD-ROM than can be copied (how, I don't know). So when you make a copy, you're really not getting everything. If they did that with DVDs, it might do something.
To my knowledge, they're both encrypted. But it's not exporting the algorithms--it's the data, which there aren't any export restrictions on (well, there might be, but not because of that). And it's not that export is illegal; you just have to get a license. I would imagine Circuit City could get a license to export DIVX to Europe. They probably haven't applied because they're waiting till they get a foothold in the states (fat chance!)
There are two things going on, decoding and decryption. Looking at the linux dvd page (which has been down for about a week, from what I can tell), it seems they have support for reading the DVD file format. So you can put your 17GB DVD in there and read the data to your heart's content. They also have alpha support for decoding the data and playing a movie from it, even in hardware (which is more efficient, of course). But that doesn't mean you can play a movie. The DVD forum also put a lot of time into cryptography. Unlike copying VHS to VHS, which degrades things, copying DVD to DVD should result in a perfect copy. It's all digital, so bit-for-bit copies should be just as perfect as the original, which would make for some nasty piracy. So the DVD Forum put cryptography measures in ther. I have no idea how this works! But in order to build a DVD player, software or hardware, you have to sign an NDA with the DVD Forum saying they get your firstborn if you tell anyone about the decryption process (obviously it's not that good if they have to keep it secret; maybe they're just paranoid). Every other computer DVD solution does the decryption in software--it's just easier that way. But you can't release the source to any of this, because that would be a violation of the NDA. So these people are putting the cryptography stuff in hardware so they can still release the source to the player. So it's this or a closed-source solution for Linux DVD.
About the AGP: that's Intel's fault, not nVidia's. Intel won't release the specs for the GART interface on their chipsets. The other chipset manufacturers will, but that's just for Super7 chipsets, which is a minority of the market, making it more difficult to get something working.
I see your point, but I think a lot of people are missing the point:
Barring any deal to the contrary, it is "RedHat" which decides whether or not they go public.
It does not matter whether IBM would prefer stock or cash (though they can get a piece of the company even if it's not publically traded). It does not matter what the employees want. It does not matter what Linus wants. It doesn't matter what I want, though if anyone's listening, put the deed in the mail!
Whoever owns the company decides. IBM and AOL probably own a bit, though we don't know that. Young and the other founders probably own the rest. I don't know. We don't know. But whoever does own it decides, and whether or not they go public will be based on their self-interest (which could of course coincide with mine, Linus's, IBM's, and their employees' self-interests).