I don't dislike what they did, I dislike their presentation. They did a reasonably good job of data collect (not exceptional, but okay). FYI, I am 25, am a PhD candidate at a Big Ten University in chemistry, and have been teaching for 6 years.
Silly graphs is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when my students give me graphs like these. Needless gridlines, unlabeled legends, connected dots, and poor statistical analysis.
I hate gridlines and they usually distract from the graph
what the fuck is "Series 1". For Christ sakes, take a minute and either delete the needless legend or at least overwrite the stupid defaults to make them meaningful
Connecting the dots means something. If you plot linux 2.1.1 and linux 2.1.14 and draw a line or someother curve between these points, you are telling me that if I pick up linux 2.1.7 it will lie on that curve. That is not a correct interpretation of this data.
Most of these graphs contain a curve labeled Expon or something (once again, great legend). Why exponential. Why not some polynomial or some other function. What is the error in the fit/correlation coefficient(s). Just tell me something that gives me a reason to believe that this curve means something.
I also find it ironic that they used MS Excel (which they don't say they did, but it sure looks like it)...
I don't know if I would call Argentina a third world country... I mean, it's not the United States of America or anything, but it is a far cry from Ethiopia or something...
It looks like Communists want revolution ~12 times more than evolution. As a matter of fact, violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat is a basic tenent of Communism. From The Communist Manifesto (emphasis is mine):
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society,
up to the point where that war breaks out into
open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of
the proletariat.
Almost every single major computational chemistry code is written in a dialect of Fortran
Interesting; I didn't know that. My Chem grad friends tell me they get all their work done on packages written for Macs, but
don't specify any languages(they're in organometallic catalysts).
Organometallic + Mac = MacSPARTAN. I don't know if that is written in Fortran or not (I hope they didn't write the GUI for it in Fortran;). SPARTAN is a pretty nice "pointy-clicky" type comp. chem. package. Or really, "molecular modeling" package. Things like this are usually used as frontends to some "real code" (usually written in Fortran). That is, I can use SPARTAN to draw my molecule(s), and then use that structure (prehaps tweaked with one of the simple methods implemented in the graphical package) as input to a real number cruncher (e.g., Gaussian).
When I pursued my Physics degree we wrote in C.
Some of the newer codes that don't depends so much on established code (which is usually in Fortran77) are moving to C.
the also-programmer element, like myself, wrote components in C and tied
them together with scripting languages. Incidentally, this approach is best in the real world, too.
Perl is like my best-friend, dude. It is graet at what Fortran (even the newest flavors) suck at: pushing strings around in a way that is easy and makes sense. I write about half as much Perl as I do Fortran, basically in the same way I was talking about SPARTAN before- to push data between Fortran based number crunchers.
oh, but avoid C++
Yeah;) I think I heard of a (chem) code written in C++ once a conference. Never heard from them since though;)
As a point of curiousity, where are you applying your chem skillz at the moment?
University of Minnesota. Home of one of the largest, best, and most well equipped comp. chem. programs in the world.;)
Anyway, I am not saying that C sucks and Fortran rocks or anything like that. Fortran has some features that are really useful when writing chem codes though. Of course C can do it, but it is harder to do right and fast there. And we all know where that leads... you should just use the best tool for the job. And a lot of times in chemistry, that tool is Fortran.
It was a cool little quasi-flamewar though. Sorry I really didn't bust out the napalm for you;)
Well gee, I suppose once you get past the 72-char line limits, the dearth of types, the pathetic flow control, and the complete lack
of objects, higher order functions, lazy eval, complex data structures, & everything we've spent 30 years developing..
Fortran90/95/2000 does not have 72-char line limits, has derived types, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, overloading... most of the stuff you've spent 30 years developing. What it doesn't have is a lot of crap that is unnecessary for scientific programing. Sure, every now and again I wish could have pointers to functions, or inheritance, but rarely. Use the best tool for the job. Modern Fortran is a really great language for scientific applications.
you're left
with code that almost no one can or will read.
Almost every single major computational chemistry code is written in a dialect of Fortran: Gaussian, GAMESS, MolPro, MOPAC,... It is the language of most scientific programmers and is excellent at what it does.
Nor can they get compilers. Writing in a flavor past F77?? Cheapest compiler -
$1000. Is that what you might call student priced?
That is just not true. And there is a group working on a GPL'd f90 compiler right now. How long did C exisit before gcc was written (before gcc was useful)? How long has C++ been around? How many problems does gcc have with C++ code? How much does a good commercial C++ compiler cost?
Anyway, your magical '10 times faster' FORTRAN skillz don't really help you since you have to work with a team. A team,
mind you, who are now all using Matlab, LISP, or Perl-with-C-mods.
A team who also knows Fortran. Or shit, if they don't it is SO easy to learn. Especially if they already know C and/or Perl.
I know it sounds picky, but microwaves really aren't the same wavelength as light.
Sorry. Microwaves are "light". Masers and lasers operate on the exact same principles. All masers are lasers, but not all lasers are masers. Another way to look at it: if "light" only means visible light, then CO2 lasers should really be called IRASERS, since they operate mainly in the infrared? And UV-lasers should be called UVASERs? I don't think so. Light can have ANY wavelength.
Okay, I think I see what you are saying here, and I agree. You are not affected until the MPAA personally comes over and sues your ass. But... I think what everone else is trying to say is that IF the MPAA DOES sue your ass, the precedent of this case is going to make their case against you practically open-and-shut, no? And with every victory, their next victory is easier. That is why no one wants them to win even once. It makes it that much harder to beat them next time.
Now definitely this is not as bad as all of this becoming law, as you say. If that happens we are all fucked because the cops can come and bust our heads. So is eveyone on the same page here now?:)
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you could find a codec that darwin SS does
support that has a n*x client.
You're probably not. But my point is that video playback common under Win and Mac are practically unheard of on other platforms. So when we (us OS/FS type people) are thinking about this kind of stuff (what kind of streaming video server or what ever) to use, we should try to find something that is cross platform all around.
Everyone seems to be saying QTSS. It is free. It works on Linux.
BFD.
Can't watch them on Linux though. Or anything else, 'cept MacOS and Win. That is where things really suck.
Now, i'm not saying it isn't great that all of this server stuff works on Linux and all, but we need both sides of the equation to keep content free, server and client.
So what do you use to watch streaming video on Linux? And what types of streams can you watch? How do they compare to the available Windows or Mac software?
Actually the cost of making copies is not zero. Or essentially zero. Or anything close to zero.
You are right. Especially about that first copy. That is kinda what i was trying to get at when I said:
We just like it when we compensate each other for the effort it took to create that
information. That is what copyright is intended to do.
But you said it much better.:)
I was more talking about the cost for that "in home" copy when I was talking about zero-cost copying. You are right to point this out to people though because it is a detail that those who know about it sometimes take for granted (like me), and those who don't know (or don't care (aka pirates)) don't talk about.
What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video
copyrighted by major companies.
And then you say:
This is just my point. Why the hell shouldn't companies be allowed to protect their property? The big word there is
copyrighted - like 'owned by'.
Which makes no sense. Even if we accept your spurious interpretation of copyright as ownership, copyright law explicitly permits copying (e.g., for backup) and time-shifting.
The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust.
Name one.
Next thing the free software guys will be trying to tell me that I can't put a chain on my bike!
Information is not at all like a bike. If i use your bike, you can't, so you better lock it or walk home. But I can use your information and you can use mine all at the same time. We just like it when we compensate each other for the effort it took to create that information. That is what copyright is intended to do.
In the "olden days", your bike analogy worked quite well. The only way for me to get compensated by consumers of my info. was to have them pay for copies. Now, the cost of making copies is essentially zero. New economic models are going to have to be created to deal with this. Someone mentioned a "'free mp3/get paid touring' business model". Why can't that work? Because it takes Time Warner and Sony out of the loop... Now does that sound right?
This is an important point I hear a lot when discussing backup solutions. "Why don't we just get a RAID array?" Or better yet, "Why don't we just back up to a big disk on another machine?"
Because, as the previous poster mentioned in passing:
RAID-5 is not an answer, because the tapes were not only in case
of disk crash/user error, but also fire, flood or other catastrophe. Our backup tapes were kept at an offsite secure storage location
for this reason.
If you want real security from your backup solution, it must be physically (and especially electrically) separated from your system. If your RAID array is hit by lightning, a bomb, a tornado, what-ever, you are screwed! But if your backup tapes from last week/month/whenever are in a safe deposit box somewhere, you can restore your data to your new location/machines.
So regardless of the merits of the question about tape size, tape technology is important and should be a topic of discussion among all would be geeks.
You just need a browser that makes \ref{LABEL} a link to where ever in the document.
Labels not in the current document (URLs) would take you there instead.
I'm curious also as to which chemistry software you refer that is available only for Linux
Fortran95 compilers and such. And it is a snap
to download tonnes of software that works on Linux. Granted a lot of it works on generic UNIX type OSes, so OpenBSD is probably cool for those ones.
Anyway, the point is, we (and lots of other people) have choosen Linux. Not OpenBSD. Maybe we should have choosen OpenBSD, but we didn't. So we need to work with Linux and don't feel like learning YAOS (yet another operating system).
Okay, I freely admit that I am woefully ignorant of the process of creating DVD's
Me too actually;)
...once I have ripped and decrypted a DVD, what's to stop me from using that data to "author" a new movie ostensibly
created by me?
Yeah, i think you are cool here. I think what the parent of all of this was saying was that you can't do a DVD->DVD copy (i.e., like hooking two VCR's up or something, or a bit by bit copy). You can go DVD->unencrypted->DVDR though, but that requires that extra step, which most consumers won't be able to figure out or bother with.
Unless you have personally audited the Linux kernel source, chances are your RedHat box is not as secure as OpenBSD,
simply due to the extensive kernel audit that OpenBSD has had and continues to undergo.
My point is that all of that work that the OpenBSD guys did (are doing) doesn't mean crap if I leave something stupid hanging open. Sure, out of the box, OpenBSD is probably way more secure than ANY Linux distro. But I know where to look
to patch up my Linux box, and I don't on OpenBSD.
So why don't I bite the bullet and learn OpenBSD? I probably should. But I have other stuff to do, like chemistry (computer monkey is not my real job). Linux helps me do chemistry, so I have to know it anyway. But learn the ins and outs of OpenBSD just to throw a firewall around my relatively safe (and frequently backed up) Linux boxes? Not worth my time, especially when i can do it in Linux if I really want that extra layer of security.
What they said about OpenBSD really struck a chord with me. I have been using Linux for 4-5 years, Solaris for a year or two before that, and
IRIX for a year or so. I have admin'd under each of these systems (6-50 boxes at a time), so I know a little about security on each one.
After a rash of hacks here (UMN), I considered firewalling my labs machines (redhat naked on the network). I was told by another admin, "Used OpenBSD, not Linux." Okay, OpenBSD is better out of the box, but I know Red Hat. I think my Red Hat setup is more secure than OpenBSD, because i know how to fix it better.
You can't burn an exact copy of a DVD to a DVDR, and your inexact copy won't play in most peoples DVD drives.
And you say:
I believe you can choose to author an unencrypted
regionless DVD (which is what we were doing) and
players will play them fine.
Notice I bolded author. I am sure you can author a DVD and copy and such with DVDR. What Nailer is talking about is copying a region encoded DVD. It won't work because the disk key area is pre-zeroed on the DVDR.
That is one of the worst web sites I have seen in a while. What is the deal with this tiny plae text on dark backgroud (whihc isn't dark, it is really a huge image of something but because it only uses three colors (black, almost black, and really black), you couldn't even appreciate it if there wasn't all of those squinty words and silly
popping up buttons and menus and shit in the way?
Nice run-on sentence 'eh?
And these freakin' plug-in's. Available for Linux, no (maybe an ancient version if you are lucky)....
I love LOTR, and I hope there movie(s) rock, but that web site has got to go...
That should provide a bit of comparison between these mega-computers and distributed computing projects.
That is nice and all, but can you use distributed computing to run a molecular dynamic simulation, an electronic structure calculation, forecast the weather/stock market, etc.? Distributed computing only works for embarassingly parallel problems. They call it embarassing because you should be embarassed to brag about the FLOPS you can pull for that problem.
PS, I am not saying distributed computing is bad (I have personally contributed just over 40 P90 CPU years to GIMPS), but comparing ASCI White and dnet is just wrong. They are two totally different things.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't dislike what they did, I dislike their presentation. They did a reasonably good job of data collect (not exceptional, but okay). FYI, I am 25, am a PhD candidate at a Big Ten University in chemistry, and have been teaching for 6 years.
Silly graphs is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when my students give me graphs like these. Needless gridlines, unlabeled legends, connected dots, and poor statistical analysis.
I also find it ironic that they used MS Excel (which they don't say they did, but it sure looks like it)...
I don't know if I would call Argentina a third world country... I mean, it's not the United States of America or anything, but it is a far cry from Ethiopia or something...
Have you checked out SuSE's licensing? You might want to look at section three of the YaST license.
It is hard to find a Linux distribution more proprietary than that, dontcha think?
Marx himself said it would never be necessary to force Communism in place of Capitalism, Capitalism would evolve into Communism naturally.
Go to your nearest Communist Manifesto and grep for revolution.
Now lets look for "evolve" and "evolution" (be careful, evolution is just revolution without the 'r'...)
It looks like Communists want revolution ~12 times more than evolution. As a matter of fact, violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat is a basic tenent of Communism. From The Communist Manifesto (emphasis is mine):
Organometallic + Mac = MacSPARTAN. I don't know if that is written in Fortran or not (I hope they didn't write the GUI for it in Fortran ;). SPARTAN is a pretty nice "pointy-clicky" type comp. chem. package. Or really, "molecular modeling" package. Things like this are usually used as frontends to some "real code" (usually written in Fortran). That is, I can use SPARTAN to draw my molecule(s), and then use that structure (prehaps tweaked with one of the simple methods implemented in the graphical package) as input to a real number cruncher (e.g., Gaussian).
When I pursued my Physics degree we wrote in C.
Some of the newer codes that don't depends so much on established code (which is usually in Fortran77) are moving to C.
the also-programmer element, like myself, wrote components in C and tied them together with scripting languages. Incidentally, this approach is best in the real world, too.
Perl is like my best-friend, dude. It is graet at what Fortran (even the newest flavors) suck at: pushing strings around in a way that is easy and makes sense. I write about half as much Perl as I do Fortran, basically in the same way I was talking about SPARTAN before- to push data between Fortran based number crunchers.
oh, but avoid C++
Yeah ;) I think I heard of a (chem) code written in C++ once a conference. Never heard from them since though ;)
As a point of curiousity, where are you applying your chem skillz at the moment?
University of Minnesota. Home of one of the largest, best, and most well equipped comp. chem. programs in the world. ;)
Anyway, I am not saying that C sucks and Fortran rocks or anything like that. Fortran has some features that are really useful when writing chem codes though. Of course C can do it, but it is harder to do right and fast there. And we all know where that leads... you should just use the best tool for the job. And a lot of times in chemistry, that tool is Fortran.
It was a cool little quasi-flamewar though. Sorry I really didn't bust out the napalm for you ;)
Well gee, I suppose once you get past the 72-char line limits, the dearth of types, the pathetic flow control, and the complete lack of objects, higher order functions, lazy eval, complex data structures, & everything we've spent 30 years developing ..
Fortran90/95/2000 does not have 72-char line limits, has derived types, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, overloading... most of the stuff you've spent 30 years developing. What it doesn't have is a lot of crap that is unnecessary for scientific programing. Sure, every now and again I wish could have pointers to functions, or inheritance, but rarely. Use the best tool for the job. Modern Fortran is a really great language for scientific applications.
you're left with code that almost no one can or will read.
Almost every single major computational chemistry code is written in a dialect of Fortran: Gaussian, GAMESS, MolPro, MOPAC,... It is the language of most scientific programmers and is excellent at what it does.
Nor can they get compilers. Writing in a flavor past F77?? Cheapest compiler - $1000. Is that what you might call student priced?
That is just not true. And there is a group working on a GPL'd f90 compiler right now. How long did C exisit before gcc was written (before gcc was useful)? How long has C++ been around? How many problems does gcc have with C++ code? How much does a good commercial C++ compiler cost?
Anyway, your magical '10 times faster' FORTRAN skillz don't really help you since you have to work with a team. A team, mind you, who are now all using Matlab, LISP, or Perl-with-C-mods.
A team who also knows Fortran. Or shit, if they don't it is SO easy to learn. Especially if they already know C and/or Perl.
Something useful written in F95
I didn't think XFree ran on MIPS. Of course it doesn't say that is what they used, but what else would they?
I know it sounds picky, but microwaves really aren't the same wavelength as light.
Sorry. Microwaves are "light". Masers and lasers operate on the exact same principles. All masers are lasers, but not all lasers are masers. Another way to look at it: if "light" only means visible light, then CO2 lasers should really be called IRASERS, since they operate mainly in the infrared? And UV-lasers should be called UVASERs? I don't think so. Light can have ANY wavelength.
Shouldn't Theo have caught this? or is he only concerned with OpenSSH?
Read past the headline:
So Theo (or someone else working on OpenSSH) DID catch it. Maybe they didn't know they caught it, or that it was exploitable, but they did fix it.
Okay, I think I see what you are saying here, and I agree. You are not affected until the MPAA personally comes over and sues your ass. But... I think what everone else is trying to say is that IF the MPAA DOES sue your ass, the precedent of this case is going to make their case against you practically open-and-shut, no? And with every victory, their next victory is easier. That is why no one wants them to win even once. It makes it that much harder to beat them next time.
Now definitely this is not as bad as all of this becoming law, as you say. If that happens we are all fucked because the cops can come and bust our heads. So is eveyone on the same page here now? :)
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you could find a codec that darwin SS does support that has a n*x client.
You're probably not. But my point is that video playback common under Win and Mac are practically unheard of on other platforms. So when we (us OS/FS type people) are thinking about this kind of stuff (what kind of streaming video server or what ever) to use, we should try to find something that is cross platform all around.
Everyone seems to be saying QTSS. It is free. It works on Linux.
BFD.
Can't watch them on Linux though. Or anything else, 'cept MacOS and Win. That is where things really suck.
Now, i'm not saying it isn't great that all of this server stuff works on Linux and all, but we need both sides of the equation to keep content free, server and client.
So what do you use to watch streaming video on Linux? And what types of streams can you watch? How do they compare to the available Windows or Mac software?
Come on... are we all five here? This is just ridiculous.
You are right. Especially about that first copy. That is kinda what i was trying to get at when I said:
But you said it much better. :)
I was more talking about the cost for that "in home" copy when I was talking about zero-cost copying. You are right to point this out to people though because it is a detail that those who know about it sometimes take for granted (like me), and those who don't know (or don't care (aka pirates)) don't talk about.
You quote:
And then you say:
Which makes no sense. Even if we accept your spurious interpretation of copyright as ownership, copyright law explicitly permits copying (e.g., for backup) and time-shifting.
The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust.
Name one.
Information is not at all like a bike. If i use your bike, you can't, so you better lock it or walk home. But I can use your information and you can use mine all at the same time. We just like it when we compensate each other for the effort it took to create that information. That is what copyright is intended to do.
In the "olden days", your bike analogy worked quite well. The only way for me to get compensated by consumers of my info. was to have them pay for copies. Now, the cost of making copies is essentially zero. New economic models are going to have to be created to deal with this. Someone mentioned a "'free mp3/get paid touring' business model". Why can't that work? Because it takes Time Warner and Sony out of the loop... Now does that sound right?
This is an important point I hear a lot when discussing backup solutions. "Why don't we just get a RAID array?" Or better yet, "Why don't we just back up to a big disk on another machine?"
Because, as the previous poster mentioned in passing:
RAID-5 is not an answer, because the tapes were not only in case of disk crash/user error, but also fire, flood or other catastrophe. Our backup tapes were kept at an offsite secure storage location for this reason.
If you want real security from your backup solution, it must be physically (and especially electrically) separated from your system. If your RAID array is hit by lightning, a bomb, a tornado, what-ever, you are screwed! But if your backup tapes from last week/month/whenever are in a safe deposit box somewhere, you can restore your data to your new location/machines.
So regardless of the merits of the question about tape size, tape technology is important and should be a topic of discussion among all would be geeks.
Linking is already there:
blah blah blah \ref{LABEL} blah blah blah.
You just need a browser that makes \ref{LABEL} a link to where ever in the document.
Labels not in the current document (URLs) would take you there instead.
I'm curious also as to which chemistry software you refer that is available only for Linux
Fortran95 compilers and such. And it is a snap to download tonnes of software that works on Linux. Granted a lot of it works on generic UNIX type OSes, so OpenBSD is probably cool for those ones.
Anyway, the point is, we (and lots of other people) have choosen Linux. Not OpenBSD. Maybe we should have choosen OpenBSD, but we didn't. So we need to work with Linux and don't feel like learning YAOS (yet another operating system).
Okay, I freely admit that I am woefully ignorant of the process of creating DVD's
Me too actually ;)
Yeah, i think you are cool here. I think what the parent of all of this was saying was that you can't do a DVD->DVD copy (i.e., like hooking two VCR's up or something, or a bit by bit copy). You can go DVD->unencrypted->DVDR though, but that requires that extra step, which most consumers won't be able to figure out or bother with.
Unless you have personally audited the Linux kernel source, chances are your RedHat box is not as secure as OpenBSD, simply due to the extensive kernel audit that OpenBSD has had and continues to undergo.
My point is that all of that work that the OpenBSD guys did (are doing) doesn't mean crap if I leave something stupid hanging open. Sure, out of the box, OpenBSD is probably way more secure than ANY Linux distro. But I know where to look to patch up my Linux box, and I don't on OpenBSD.
So why don't I bite the bullet and learn OpenBSD? I probably should. But I have other stuff to do, like chemistry (computer monkey is not my real job). Linux helps me do chemistry, so I have to know it anyway. But learn the ins and outs of OpenBSD just to throw a firewall around my relatively safe (and frequently backed up) Linux boxes? Not worth my time, especially when i can do it in Linux if I really want that extra layer of security.
What they said about OpenBSD really struck a chord with me. I have been using Linux for 4-5 years, Solaris for a year or two before that, and IRIX for a year or so. I have admin'd under each of these systems (6-50 boxes at a time), so I know a little about security on each one.
After a rash of hacks here (UMN), I considered firewalling my labs machines (redhat naked on the network). I was told by another admin, "Used OpenBSD, not Linux." Okay, OpenBSD is better out of the box, but I know Red Hat. I think my Red Hat setup is more secure than OpenBSD, because i know how to fix it better.
In other words, OpenBSD is not always the answer.
Nailer says:
You can't burn an exact copy of a DVD to a DVDR, and your inexact copy won't play in most peoples DVD drives.
And you say:
I believe you can choose to author an unencrypted regionless DVD (which is what we were doing) and players will play them fine.
Notice I bolded author. I am sure you can author a DVD and copy and such with DVDR. What Nailer is talking about is copying a region encoded DVD. It won't work because the disk key area is pre-zeroed on the DVDR.
That is one of the worst web sites I have seen in a while. What is the deal with this tiny plae text on dark backgroud (whihc isn't dark, it is really a huge image of something but because it only uses three colors (black, almost black, and really black), you couldn't even appreciate it if there wasn't all of those squinty words and silly popping up buttons and menus and shit in the way?
Nice run-on sentence 'eh?
And these freakin' plug-in's. Available for Linux, no (maybe an ancient version if you are lucky)....
I love LOTR, and I hope there movie(s) rock, but that web site has got to go...
That should provide a bit of comparison between these mega-computers and distributed computing projects.
That is nice and all, but can you use distributed computing to run a molecular dynamic simulation, an electronic structure calculation, forecast the weather/stock market, etc.? Distributed computing only works for embarassingly parallel problems. They call it embarassing because you should be embarassed to brag about the FLOPS you can pull for that problem.
PS, I am not saying distributed computing is bad (I have personally contributed just over 40 P90 CPU years to GIMPS), but comparing ASCI White and dnet is just wrong. They are two totally different things.