Nice try, but unless the routers know where packets are headed they can't route them. And oh, this packet looks like it's headed for port 6346? Ditch it. Oh, you've changed to KaZaa now? That port's toast. Oh, you've decided to get tricky and conviced everybody to use port 80. Nix - you can only visit official websites now. ICMP? Nope, we'll just overwrite any twiddlable bits that might be carrying information.
Oh, look, "They" can block our information pathways. Sucks, don't it?
IIRC, there are high-speed compressors (capable of super-realtime compression) available. That takes care of *most* of your data requirements, as voice really does fit nicely into ~16kbps or so. Encryption with symmetric ciphers is usually pretty speedy, whereas asymmetric ciphers, well, aren't - this is why TLS (formerly SSLv3. It's IETF RFC 2246) uses asymmetric ciphers only to generate a session key that's used for symmetric encryption. According to later research, though, all the CBC modes of TLS are prone to an attack where an onlooker can determine if a given bitstring has been transferred, IIRC - I believe this has been corrected in the AES CBC ciphers added later, though I am not sure.
SSH does TLS negotation or something very similar (it uses OpenSSL, either way) and is *more* than capable of transfering files at 100+KBps even on an old 486 at 66Mhz.
Hideous, twisted language - I spent days working in it for my challenge project at school, attempting to reconstruct a building on campus. By hand. Boy was that stupid.
All that aside, it's already here. It could use some extension (some people have proprietarily extended it to include NURBS, reflection, refraction? - this should become part of the open standard). We've got a base foundation, why go inventing something else, that will probably be XML based and even MORE bulky than VRML? Oh yeah - I hope they come up with a binary encoding scheme for VRML. Plain-text programming is nice and all, but damn it's huge to carry those things around.
That'd be all well and good if wealth were evenly distributed, or distributed per-work, in a corporation. However, as it isn't, with more money going to the higher-ups, corporate interests are HEAVILY biased by the upper classes and any profits they (corporations) make are also sent primarily to the upper class.
An alternative would be a kabutz-style payment system (like that's ever going to get implemented) where everybody votes on the payment system (in addition to everything else).
So while you may claim MSFT employs 1000s, which they do, that neglects the fact that Bill Gates and his cronies get A LOT more of the pie, proportion-wise, than they deserve. And it's not just MSFT - I don't mean to critisize them at all for this, it really is Best Current Practice - it's the entire system.
And, moreover, there is no such thing as a right to earn income. There is a right to persue (sp?) income, but no right to actually earn it. Odds are, though, that you *will*, it is just *not* guaranteed.
Within a corporation, individual freedoms are mostly lost to the whims of the same higher-ups. Why? Because it's not profitable. And since the higher-ups run everything and get a greater payoff from the company, well, their rules go.
Before you accuse me of being an idealistic hippie still-living-at-home kid, well - yes, I'm about to be going off to college. However, I have held several full-time summer positions (45-hour weeks) in IT departments, in addition to a host of job-like and not job-like extracurriculars during the school year. So I have some idea what I'm talking about, I think.
Anybody want to bet which country is the first to refuse to honor any IP law?
ISTR the Ukraine didn't acknowledge US copyrights? (I've got a bad memory module, I think - help me out here). Maybe they should continue that trend.
After all the US's economy did pretty well a century or two ago after it refused to honor UK IP, allowing factories to spring up there which would otherwise be "in violation" of the patent/copyright.
>To put one persons fredom above the needs of the producers of a product sounds a lot like socialism.
And you say that like it's a bad thing. To put people's freedom's above the Right to Profit that is rapidly proliferating makes sense. There is no good reason that corporations should be assured profits. In a reasonable market, there would be plenty of smaller fish able vying to take over when the bigger fish toppled. We've allowed monopolies or near-monopolies into place that are actually leaching at our economy, as opposed to helping it.
That aside, I am never, never going to bow to corporate interests. Fuck 'em. Individual freedom, and the right to exersize that freedom, is substantially more important.
Screw the corporation and, if we have to, screw the economy to some degree.
I am SO sick of hearing "it's good for the economy." You know what the economy is? It's a set of rules WE make and WE choose to play by, not some God-given system. WE made it. And no subset of us (politicians) have the right (I sure as hell didn't give 'em it, and I doubt you did either) to choose for us all that one set of rules (economy) is more important than another ("rights"). If we want that, let's erect a dictatorship, or allow, as we are doing, the current system to fall into an oligarchical state.
KEEP LOBBYING. Corporations are NOT individuals, despite that the US of A says they are. They are NOT guaranteed the same rights, and they SHOULD NOT be guaranteed *any* rights, IMNSHO. Give them a set of rules ("laws") and that's it. None of this evolving "right to profit." Government subsidies, if determined necessary for general welfare, should EXACTLY cover costs+labor and no more.
Why play MineSweeper though WINE? Well, aside from the fact that we can. If it's MineSweeper you want, there are several native versions that will be faster, look better, and most probably match your desktop theme(s). ^_~
As for en masse adoption,::shrugs:: It works for me. And at least as far as my system goes, it's free (as in beer, and speech). It works for hundreds of thousands, if not millions others, too. Choice and competition is *good*. Homogeneous *anything* other than, perhaps, protocols (at least we agree, mostly, on IP) - even there there's a huge amount of wiggle room (file transfers over HTTP, FTP, raw streams, SSH/SCP, GOPHER, etc, etc, for example). The internet derives its power from the comonality of *one layer* of the protocol stack and the fact that everything else can be twiddled at will without damaging the network. Who cares if a node is Linux, BSD, Windows, whatever, as long as it behaves.
Well, if you can recieve, you can packetsniff. Though yes, Tesla actually did use his transceivers to send data across the air (stock quotes, messages, even commands for a Tesla-powered remote control submarine).
Actually, Tesla's ideas use the earth as one side and the atmosphere as the other side of essentially a global capacator. If memory serves, this works especially well because high-frequency AC sees the atmosphere as a large capacator in parallel with (bridging the ends of) the transformer whereas low-frequency AC sees it as a short.
Erhm? Using G for ground, N for negative, and P for positive, you have: N-G, G-N, P-G, G-P, N-P, and P-N voltages. Remember, voltage is just a difference in charge per columb. Now then, it's not terribly likely that they'd do spanning of the hot rails instead of just providing another rail relative to the common ground, but still, you *can* get (n 2) [n above 2 = n^2 - n] voltages from n lines.
Additionally, if they want to offer {+,-,0*}voltage, it may actually make sense (think ease of preventing ground loops and improved electrical isolation) to offer different grounds for each channel.
Tesla coil PCs! Now that would require some interesting shielding around the sensitive stuff, but admit it - a truely cable-free PC would be oh-so-awesome. ^_^
Well, for things like the ability to break RSA there are "Zero Knowledge Proofs" that can only work interactively and have a ~1/2^n or worse odds of successfully cheating (n is the number of rounds) played.
Granted you'd have to ZK prove it to a whole lot of people, and you may even have to devize (and prove) your own ZKP algorightm, but it *can* be done.
It's easy to prove a proof is zero knowledge - if a transcript of the session cannot be used to prove the statement's validity.
"nonpredictable deterministic" is slightly oxymoronish. I think you just meant "nondeterministic."
And cryptographic hashes are all well and good, but in this situation they won't buy you anything since they'd be the same as a noncryptographic hash (no key material is exchanged with the other node).
But yes, using statistics you could potentially determine what a node has, I think, unless FreeNet's yet again upped the ante.
However, you can't legally attack the owner or operator of the node because 1) running FreeNet isn't illegal, and 2) the node owner can always claim perfect ignorance of what's on their node. It is all kept encrypted in local stores for exactly that reason.
> You could always send queries with a "hops to live" of zero
Yes, you *could*, but there's a setting in later versions of FreeNet that assigns a probability of forwarding TTL=0 (or is it a probability of decrement... I forget) queries such that you could never be *sure* that it was that node that had the file.
I've been a longtime proponent of an "introduction" algorithm being added to Gnutella. I'm still not sure exactly *what* to introduce, but a handful of ideas that seem good are:
1) As you said, nodes sharing the same file. Introduce them to each other, have them compare SHA1 hashes [a bit-commitment protocol is necessary so nodes cannot cheat and return what the other is expecting after they got it]. Making full use of this would require the ability to return redirects instead of files.
2) Nodes in closer network-proximity - say on the same LAN or behind a common router. If the network collapsed (no, no, not failed) to be closer to the underlying structure of the internet it would reduce the potential flooding of non-node routers (i.e. machines that aren't participating in the Gnutella network, just routing packets) and possibly nodes as well, but I'm not sure.
As for your DB, I don't see it as being all that important. Go ahead and add it if you want - a local community could make use of it, but I wouldn't anticipate it being popular for the internet at large. Especially if the nodes keep a short list of other nodes sharing given files (see my #1).
Combine #1 and the ability for nodes to answer "I've got you in queue slot #N" and the downloading node can intelligently traverse the sugguested alternate servers until it finds a place to download or one of the queueing servers announces that it may download. At which point the downloader should cancel its presence in the other servers' queues.
Surprisingly, I've not seen much of those RTFMers, nor have any of the handful of people I've helped make the transition to Linux or OSS in general.
While I'm not disagreeing it's a problem, it doesn't seem that rampant. I know I always try my best to explain things when asked and most people I've talked to do as well. Admittedly I've taught myself most of the Linux/programming/etc I know, but one always has to ask somebody for help periodically.
And if somebody DOES tell you to RTFM, it probably means you should, eventually. Not right then - you might want your answer now and not have to dig through the manual. So don't hate people who sugguest reading the manual - it *is* useful to read them.
May I sugguest you try: 1) A later kernel. If you're already running that... 2) A preemptive kernel. Yes, the patches are still there for 2.4, or if you're hesitant to go patching, the -ac tree (ISTR) and WOLK has this already integrated. For extra bonus points, try Ingo's O(1) scheduler. 3) Low-latency patches. Dunno where they might be integrated. 4) Make sure DMA is actually on. Run "dmesg" and look at IDE's initialization. If it says PIO, something's not right about your DMA - check that your kernel has the appropriate driver and, if you have to, manually kick DMA in via hdparm (optionally in your boot scripts). 5) Try ALSA - it supports multiple applications opening/dev/dsp via OSS compatibility mode (another set of modules to build).
Does CSS add information to the bitstream? It's a reversable transform (given a key - they're not asymetric keys, are they?)?
If not, Shannon says you can compress an encoded and a decoded file equally. If so, well, then maybe DeCSS should be counted as "Stage 1" of a two-stage lossy compressor (the second stage being a DivX/MPEG4 re-encoding).
Here's a wacky thought that I've not seen mentioned (confession: I didn't read *every* comment). Inverters are not, to mh knowledge, incredibly efficient, nor are the wallwarts often used. So why not wire your house with a minimalistic AC system for what needs it and feed the rest off a ~35V DC bus with DC-DC converters to replace the wallwarts?
35V because that's near the upper limit on some of the cheaper DC-DC converters I've looked at (the actual number needs more investigation). The upper limit instead of [random] because energy distribution loss decreases with voltage. And DC-DCs because they have better than 90% efficiency in many cases without being incredibly expensive. There even exist DC-DCs capable of producing all the voltages needed inside a PC - so why not just rip out the power supply and replace it with a/several DC-DCs? It can't *hurt* efficiency to bypass the inverter/rectifier or inverter/switching-power-supply, can it?
Erhm... no, sorry, 2.4.19 is out NOW. Yes, I run Gentoo, and yes, it's confusing as fsck. 2.4.19-gentoo-r7 is actually based on 2.4.19-pre5, if memory serves.
> What's your point? We should pay more for things, > not have a vibrant economy, and work less? Oh > great.. yeah that wont reesult in people > starving. Sure.
Where the fuck did you pull that?
> First of all your physics is irrelevant.
Never.
> Anyay, a human only consumes 2.4 kilowatts a day > of energy (this energy comes from the plants and > animals we eat).. we're like a 100 watt light > bulb that is powered by plant and animal energy.
I doubt the 2.4 KW/day stat, but yes, you've got the general idea.
And as for the next paragraph.... wow, where to start.
> So if we can produce a kind of energy tablets > from the fusion reactors (which tap into the > limitless supply of energy from the ocean)
Please pay more attention in physics class. Fusion requires "heavy water" which is DHO (deuterium-oxygen-hydrogen) insead of HHO. Yes, it's just water, however it's subject to the usual "finite supply" problems.
> quadrizzillion kilos of water are there in the > earth's ocean alone? And we have a constant > supply of energy from the sun too.
Uh, sure. Assuming we can do perfect conversion, that's all well and good until all the matter around us has been converted and the resultant energy radiated into space (which is happening already, you know).
And the sun is due to die out in 5x10^12 years anyway, and moreover it's not limitless, it's rate-capped (well, excepting solar flares, which just push the limit higher) so we have a maximum rate of consumption before we start having to turn to other power sources.
> As the global economy improves, the population > growth rate will steadily decline until it > reaches some stable point.
Weeeell, yes, but it's still exponential right now and due to quickly run the earth out of resources (see earlier slashdot article setting the year as early as 2050, if memory serves).
> And I dont see any way in which population > growth will happen as our economic suituation > improves.. as economic situations improve > people dont have as many kids (thats why the > populations in richer countries are growing as > fast as in the poorer countries).
Yees, but life expectancy shoots up too. Even if we all stopped having kids NOW, there'd still be another hundred+ years of people on the planet. And recent research has shown that similarly long lag times exist for things like pollution - the past century's CO2 emissions are still mostly cumulative in the atmosphere. Percent still present for any given year is a dual-horizonal asymptotic exponential ( f(x) = At[B - e^(rt)]^(-1) )function with ~100% at x=0 (now) and ~0% at x=-100 years (100 years ago) multiplied by the CO2 emissions of that year.
So the integral of this function tells us that we've got huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere that we put there that will be bugging us for at least the next hundred years if we stop RIGHT NOW.
Anyway, I forgot where I was going with that, but suffice to say that we're not doing the earth any favors.
No, no there really aren't. We the public have started to wake up again, but it's too late to save the system "maturely." The world has been brought under the control of a few, mostly rightist, people who have very little interest in the rest of the world except as exploitables. The hippies of the 60s thought the same thing, and perhaps they were right then too - how on earth could they have truly stopped "the knowledge industry" (president UCal @ Berkeley) or the war?
Now, your image of mob rule (though you put it in quotes) is one of unorganized massive destruction, I'd imagine. However, in this day and age, especially about techilogical matters, we have the power to be a smart mob - with much more awareness of our own actions and those of others and also with a decentralized consciousness.
Years of peaceful, mature actions have gone by... with very little noticable effect: the industry and oligarchy / plutocracy have done what they will, which recent past tells us is "screw the poor(er) for their own gain." And I say it's about time we got fed up with being bent over to serve their wills.
That said, a DDoS didn't have much power in itself, though as others above have argued it could be considered a ditigal sit-in. However, note the side-effect: A ZDnet article into which the author put more truly stupid comments from the RIAA ("ten minutes away from stealing music" especially) and their (yes, that's right, their) proposed legislation instead of bashing the DDoSers! Wow, imagine that.
Oh, by the way, did anybody else see the article on the RIAA's page that sugguested doing away with the middlemen? It also had a beauty: "Download to the internet" - MORONS. (FYI, it's at: http://www.riaa.org/PR_story.cfm?id=539)
Slashdot Mirror
Nice try, but unless the routers know where packets are headed they can't route them. And oh, this packet looks like it's headed for port 6346? Ditch it. Oh, you've changed to KaZaa now? That port's toast. Oh, you've decided to get tricky and conviced everybody to use port 80. Nix - you can only visit official websites now. ICMP? Nope, we'll just overwrite any twiddlable bits that might be carrying information.
Oh, look, "They" can block our information pathways. Sucks, don't it?
--Knots;
IIRC, there are high-speed compressors (capable of super-realtime compression) available. That takes care of *most* of your data requirements, as voice really does fit nicely into ~16kbps or so. Encryption with symmetric ciphers is usually pretty speedy, whereas asymmetric ciphers, well, aren't - this is why TLS (formerly SSLv3. It's IETF RFC 2246) uses asymmetric ciphers only to generate a session key that's used for symmetric encryption. According to later research, though, all the CBC modes of TLS are prone to an attack where an onlooker can determine if a given bitstring has been transferred, IIRC - I believe this has been corrected in the AES CBC ciphers added later, though I am not sure.
SSH does TLS negotation or something very similar (it uses OpenSSL, either way) and is *more* than capable of transfering files at 100+KBps even on an old 486 at 66Mhz.
--Knots;
What's stopping them from doing that *too*? A live-CD demo could easily be tucked among the countless other bundled products.
I think the issue, as others have said, is that they don't want to support Linux in addition to Windows (MSFT does require them to do that, remember).
Maybe they should contract out support to RHAT.
--Knots;
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML).
Hideous, twisted language - I spent days working in it for my challenge project at school, attempting to reconstruct a building on campus. By hand. Boy was that stupid.
All that aside, it's already here. It could use some extension (some people have proprietarily extended it to include NURBS, reflection, refraction? - this should become part of the open standard). We've got a base foundation, why go inventing something else, that will probably be XML based and even MORE bulky than VRML? Oh yeah - I hope they come up with a binary encoding scheme for VRML. Plain-text programming is nice and all, but damn it's huge to carry those things around.
--Knots;
That'd be all well and good if wealth were evenly distributed, or distributed per-work, in a corporation. However, as it isn't, with more money going to the higher-ups, corporate interests are HEAVILY biased by the upper classes and any profits they (corporations) make are also sent primarily to the upper class.
An alternative would be a kabutz-style payment system (like that's ever going to get implemented) where everybody votes on the payment system (in addition to everything else).
So while you may claim MSFT employs 1000s, which they do, that neglects the fact that Bill Gates and his cronies get A LOT more of the pie, proportion-wise, than they deserve. And it's not just MSFT - I don't mean to critisize them at all for this, it really is Best Current Practice - it's the entire system.
And, moreover, there is no such thing as a right to earn income. There is a right to persue (sp?) income, but no right to actually earn it. Odds are, though, that you *will*, it is just *not* guaranteed.
Within a corporation, individual freedoms are mostly lost to the whims of the same higher-ups. Why? Because it's not profitable. And since the higher-ups run everything and get a greater payoff from the company, well, their rules go.
Before you accuse me of being an idealistic hippie still-living-at-home kid, well - yes, I'm about to be going off to college. However, I have held several full-time summer positions (45-hour weeks) in IT departments, in addition to a host of job-like and not job-like extracurriculars during the school year. So I have some idea what I'm talking about, I think.
--Knots;
Anybody want to bet which country is the first to refuse to honor any IP law?
ISTR the Ukraine didn't acknowledge US copyrights? (I've got a bad memory module, I think - help me out here). Maybe they should continue that trend.
After all the US's economy did pretty well a century or two ago after it refused to honor UK IP, allowing factories to spring up there which would otherwise be "in violation" of the patent/copyright.
Yeah, yeah, offtopic, I know.
--Knots;
>To put one persons fredom above the needs of the producers of a product sounds a lot like socialism.
And you say that like it's a bad thing. To put people's freedom's above the Right to Profit that is rapidly proliferating makes sense. There is no good reason that corporations should be assured profits. In a reasonable market, there would be plenty of smaller fish able vying to take over when the bigger fish toppled. We've allowed monopolies or near-monopolies into place that are actually leaching at our economy, as opposed to helping it.
That aside, I am never, never going to bow to corporate interests. Fuck 'em. Individual freedom, and the right to exersize that freedom, is substantially more important.
--Knots;
Screw the corporation and, if we have to, screw the economy to some degree.
I am SO sick of hearing "it's good for the economy." You know what the economy is? It's a set of rules WE make and WE choose to play by, not some God-given system. WE made it. And no subset of us (politicians) have the right (I sure as hell didn't give 'em it, and I doubt you did either) to choose for us all that one set of rules (economy) is more important than another ("rights"). If we want that, let's erect a dictatorship, or allow, as we are doing, the current system to fall into an oligarchical state.
KEEP LOBBYING. Corporations are NOT individuals, despite that the US of A says they are. They are NOT guaranteed the same rights, and they SHOULD NOT be guaranteed *any* rights, IMNSHO. Give them a set of rules ("laws") and that's it. None of this evolving "right to profit." Government subsidies, if determined necessary for general welfare, should EXACTLY cover costs+labor and no more.
Sorry, I'm tired and angry.
--Knots;
Why play MineSweeper though WINE? Well, aside from the fact that we can. If it's MineSweeper you want, there are several native versions that will be faster, look better, and most probably match your desktop theme(s). ^_~
::shrugs:: It works for me. And at least as far as my system goes, it's free (as in beer, and speech). It works for hundreds of thousands, if not millions others, too. Choice and competition is *good*. Homogeneous *anything* other than, perhaps, protocols (at least we agree, mostly, on IP) - even there there's a huge amount of wiggle room (file transfers over HTTP, FTP, raw streams, SSH/SCP, GOPHER, etc, etc, for example). The internet derives its power from the comonality of *one layer* of the protocol stack and the fact that everything else can be twiddled at will without damaging the network. Who cares if a node is Linux, BSD, Windows, whatever, as long as it behaves.
As for en masse adoption,
--Knots;
Well, if you can recieve, you can packetsniff. Though yes, Tesla actually did use his transceivers to send data across the air (stock quotes, messages, even commands for a Tesla-powered remote control submarine).
--Knots;
Actually, Tesla's ideas use the earth as one side and the atmosphere as the other side of essentially a global capacator. If memory serves, this works especially well because high-frequency AC sees the atmosphere as a large capacator in parallel with (bridging the ends of) the transformer whereas low-frequency AC sees it as a short.
--Knots;
Erhm? Using G for ground, N for negative, and P for positive, you have: N-G, G-N, P-G, G-P, N-P, and P-N voltages. Remember, voltage is just a difference in charge per columb. Now then, it's not terribly likely that they'd do spanning of the hot rails instead of just providing another rail relative to the common ground, but still, you *can* get (n 2) [n above 2 = n^2 - n] voltages from n lines.
Additionally, if they want to offer {+,-,0*}voltage, it may actually make sense (think ease of preventing ground loops and improved electrical isolation) to offer different grounds for each channel.
--Knots;
Tesla coil PCs! Now that would require some interesting shielding around the sensitive stuff, but admit it - a truely cable-free PC would be oh-so-awesome. ^_^
--Knots;
Well, for things like the ability to break RSA there are "Zero Knowledge Proofs" that can only work interactively and have a ~1/2^n or worse odds of successfully cheating (n is the number of rounds) played.
Granted you'd have to ZK prove it to a whole lot of people, and you may even have to devize (and prove) your own ZKP algorightm, but it *can* be done.
It's easy to prove a proof is zero knowledge - if a transcript of the session cannot be used to prove the statement's validity.
--Knots;
I think you have some terms confused.
"nonpredictable deterministic" is slightly oxymoronish. I think you just meant "nondeterministic."
And cryptographic hashes are all well and good, but in this situation they won't buy you anything since they'd be the same as a noncryptographic hash (no key material is exchanged with the other node).
But yes, using statistics you could potentially determine what a node has, I think, unless FreeNet's yet again upped the ante.
However, you can't legally attack the owner or operator of the node because 1) running FreeNet isn't illegal, and 2) the node owner can always claim perfect ignorance of what's on their node. It is all kept encrypted in local stores for exactly that reason.
--Knots;
> You could always send queries with a "hops to live" of zero
Yes, you *could*, but there's a setting in later versions of FreeNet that assigns a probability of forwarding TTL=0 (or is it a probability of decrement... I forget) queries such that you could never be *sure* that it was that node that had the file.
--Knots;
I've been a longtime proponent of an "introduction" algorithm being added to Gnutella. I'm still not sure exactly *what* to introduce, but a handful of ideas that seem good are:
1) As you said, nodes sharing the same file. Introduce them to each other, have them compare SHA1 hashes [a bit-commitment protocol is necessary so nodes cannot cheat and return what the other is expecting after they got it]. Making full use of this would require the ability to return redirects instead of files.
2) Nodes in closer network-proximity - say on the same LAN or behind a common router. If the network collapsed (no, no, not failed) to be closer to the underlying structure of the internet it would reduce the potential flooding of non-node routers (i.e. machines that aren't participating in the Gnutella network, just routing packets) and possibly nodes as well, but I'm not sure.
As for your DB, I don't see it as being all that important. Go ahead and add it if you want - a local community could make use of it, but I wouldn't anticipate it being popular for the internet at large. Especially if the nodes keep a short list of other nodes sharing given files (see my #1).
Combine #1 and the ability for nodes to answer "I've got you in queue slot #N" and the downloading node can intelligently traverse the sugguested alternate servers until it finds a place to download or one of the queueing servers announces that it may download. At which point the downloader should cancel its presence in the other servers' queues.
--Knots;
To be fair, he could be using a stow-like setup.
For example: GNU Stow
--Knots;
Surprisingly, I've not seen much of those RTFMers, nor have any of the handful of people I've helped make the transition to Linux or OSS in general.
While I'm not disagreeing it's a problem, it doesn't seem that rampant. I know I always try my best to explain things when asked and most people I've talked to do as well. Admittedly I've taught myself most of the Linux/programming/etc I know, but one always has to ask somebody for help periodically.
And if somebody DOES tell you to RTFM, it probably means you should, eventually. Not right then - you might want your answer now and not have to dig through the manual. So don't hate people who sugguest reading the manual - it *is* useful to read them.
--Knots;
May I sugguest you try: /dev/dsp via OSS compatibility mode (another set of modules to build).
1) A later kernel. If you're already running that...
2) A preemptive kernel. Yes, the patches are still there for 2.4, or if you're hesitant to go patching, the -ac tree (ISTR) and WOLK has this already integrated. For extra bonus points, try Ingo's O(1) scheduler.
3) Low-latency patches. Dunno where they might be integrated.
4) Make sure DMA is actually on. Run "dmesg" and look at IDE's initialization. If it says PIO, something's not right about your DMA - check that your kernel has the appropriate driver and, if you have to, manually kick DMA in via hdparm (optionally in your boot scripts).
5) Try ALSA - it supports multiple applications opening
Hope that helps.
Does CSS add information to the bitstream? It's a reversable transform (given a key - they're not asymetric keys, are they?)?
If not, Shannon says you can compress an encoded and a decoded file equally. If so, well, then maybe DeCSS should be counted as "Stage 1" of a two-stage lossy compressor (the second stage being a DivX/MPEG4 re-encoding).
--Knots;
Here's a wacky thought that I've not seen mentioned (confession: I didn't read *every* comment). Inverters are not, to mh knowledge, incredibly efficient, nor are the wallwarts often used. So why not wire your house with a minimalistic AC system for what needs it and feed the rest off a ~35V DC bus with DC-DC converters to replace the wallwarts?
35V because that's near the upper limit on some of the cheaper DC-DC converters I've looked at (the actual number needs more investigation). The upper limit instead of [random] because energy distribution loss decreases with voltage. And DC-DCs because they have better than 90% efficiency in many cases without being incredibly expensive. There even exist DC-DCs capable of producing all the voltages needed inside a PC - so why not just rip out the power supply and replace it with a/several DC-DCs? It can't *hurt* efficiency to bypass the inverter/rectifier or inverter/switching-power-supply, can it?
--Knots;
Erhm... no, sorry, 2.4.19 is out NOW. Yes, I run Gentoo, and yes, it's confusing as fsck. 2.4.19-gentoo-r7 is actually based on 2.4.19-pre5, if memory serves.
> What's your point? We should pay more for things, .. yeah that wont reesult in people
.. we're like a 100 watt light
.. as economic situations improve
> not have a vibrant economy, and work less? Oh
> great
> starving. Sure.
Where the fuck did you pull that?
> First of all your physics is irrelevant.
Never.
> Anyay, a human only consumes 2.4 kilowatts a day
> of energy (this energy comes from the plants and
> animals we eat)
> bulb that is powered by plant and animal energy.
I doubt the 2.4 KW/day stat, but yes, you've got the general idea.
And as for the next paragraph.... wow, where to start.
> So if we can produce a kind of energy tablets
> from the fusion reactors (which tap into the
> limitless supply of energy from the ocean)
Please pay more attention in physics class. Fusion requires "heavy water" which is DHO (deuterium-oxygen-hydrogen) insead of HHO. Yes, it's just water, however it's subject to the usual "finite supply" problems.
> quadrizzillion kilos of water are there in the
> earth's ocean alone? And we have a constant
> supply of energy from the sun too.
Uh, sure. Assuming we can do perfect conversion, that's all well and good until all the matter around us has been converted and the resultant energy radiated into space (which is happening already, you know).
And the sun is due to die out in 5x10^12 years anyway, and moreover it's not limitless, it's rate-capped (well, excepting solar flares, which just push the limit higher) so we have a maximum rate of consumption before we start having to turn to other power sources.
> As the global economy improves, the population
> growth rate will steadily decline until it
> reaches some stable point.
Weeeell, yes, but it's still exponential right now and due to quickly run the earth out of resources (see earlier slashdot article setting the year as early as 2050, if memory serves).
> And I dont see any way in which population
> growth will happen as our economic suituation
> improves
> people dont have as many kids (thats why the
> populations in richer countries are growing as
> fast as in the poorer countries).
Yees, but life expectancy shoots up too. Even if we all stopped having kids NOW, there'd still be another hundred+ years of people on the planet. And recent research has shown that similarly long lag times exist for things like pollution - the past century's CO2 emissions are still mostly cumulative in the atmosphere. Percent still present for any given year is a dual-horizonal asymptotic exponential ( f(x) = At[B - e^(rt)]^(-1) )function with ~100% at x=0 (now) and ~0% at x=-100 years (100 years ago) multiplied by the CO2 emissions of that year.
So the integral of this function tells us that we've got huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere that we put there that will be bugging us for at least the next hundred years if we stop RIGHT NOW.
Anyway, I forgot where I was going with that, but suffice to say that we're not doing the earth any favors.
--Knots;
No, no there really aren't. We the public have started to wake up again, but it's too late to save the system "maturely." The world has been brought under the control of a few, mostly rightist, people who have very little interest in the rest of the world except as exploitables. The hippies of the 60s thought the same thing, and perhaps they were right then too - how on earth could they have truly stopped "the knowledge industry" (president UCal @ Berkeley) or the war?
Now, your image of mob rule (though you put it in quotes) is one of unorganized massive destruction, I'd imagine. However, in this day and age, especially about techilogical matters, we have the power to be a smart mob - with much more awareness of our own actions and those of others and also with a decentralized consciousness.
Years of peaceful, mature actions have gone by... with very little noticable effect: the industry and oligarchy / plutocracy have done what they will, which recent past tells us is "screw the poor(er) for their own gain." And I say it's about time we got fed up with being bent over to serve their wills.
That said, a DDoS didn't have much power in itself, though as others above have argued it could be considered a ditigal sit-in. However, note the side-effect: A ZDnet article into which the author put more truly stupid comments from the RIAA ("ten minutes away from stealing music" especially) and their (yes, that's right, their) proposed legislation instead of bashing the DDoSers! Wow, imagine that.
Oh, by the way, did anybody else see the article on the RIAA's page that sugguested doing away with the middlemen? It also had a beauty: "Download to the internet" - MORONS. (FYI, it's at: http://www.riaa.org/PR_story.cfm?id=539)
--Knots;