That's not true for everyone. I always just dowload the whole kernel. It's much easier than patching. I usually get about 120 KB/s to most mirrors, so 10 MB is only 2 minutes. It's not worth dealing with the patches.
I doubt it. By embracing Linux, they gain a shot at the home market which would never pay for a DU license. It allows them to break into a whole new market.
For people who need servers, though, they'll still be able to sell DU licenses, because DU does have some features that Linux lacks. For example, Digital's Fortran compiler is a lot better than g77. That's still important for people who need to support lots of legacy code.
So they gain in the home market, without hurting their server market too much. Well worth it.
Also worth noting is that Alphas have been available with NT for years now. Embracing NT probably dropped more DU licenses than Linux would, and NT doesn't gain you much of anything on the home front.
I don't like the smell of this thing. I've used the DOS version of this before, back when I still used DOS, but now, I feel differently.
This kind of functionality is much to important to be non-free. I'm afraid that new applications might come out that require something like this. Why write drivers? SciTech will do it for you! Bah!
Avoid this like the plague. Please do not let this become an established product. It could seriously damage the community.
If you wrote code which was derived from GPL'd ext2fs code, then you only have two options. You can not distribute the code to anyone, or you can distribute it under the terms of the GPL. And "anyone" includes to the employer who paid you. If someone contracts you to write GPL software, you can resell/give it to anyone else you like as well. It's perfectly legal.
If you use smail on a Debian system, the configuration script already does this. After smail is configured, it asks the user if he would like to send a test message to the Linux Counter project. If you answer yes, Linux Counter++.
These contests are great. I have absolutely no talent in this area, but I love seeing what other people can produce with contests like this and www.irtc.org and so on, but what disappoints me most is that the images produced are always so small! 800x600 doesn't due many of these creations justice. I'd much rather see these contests run at 1600x1200, or at least 1280x1024. I'd even donate CPU cycles for something like that!
I have a hard time imagining how interacting with certain pieces of hardware would work. I mean, if we just consider a PNP sound card, which OS initializes it? When the card generates an interrupt, which OS handles it?
With the price of computers coming down as quickly as they are, I think I'd rather just buy two computers if I really need to run two operating systems concurrently. The cost of a basic headless PC isn't that much more than the $300 asking price for the software and you don't have all of these kinds of headaches. Sounds like a bad idea to me.
The way I understand it, watermarking could only stop piracy if *everything* was watermarked, including ordinary CD's.
Not everyone in the world is ready to switch from CD's to mp3's. There's still a hell of a lot of audio equipment out there which is built to play non-compressed CD's and there's still a demand for traditional compact discs.
The problem is that the entire music distribution industry isn't set up for this. CD's are stamped im mass production. Making each CD unique would drive up the cost immensely, and getting and recording a valid ID from all the teens buying CD's in the mall seems like an impossible task.
But if this is not done, if there is an easy source of non-watermarked data, then pirates will be just as easily able to create non-watermarked mp3's for trade as they are today. Warez site and piracy will not be thwarted in the least.
Forget about trying to remove the watermark. Just buy one CD, compress, upload/download to your heart's content.
Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it?
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that what you'd find if you did this is that all of the bits are different. (Well, not *all*, really, just randomly setting bits won't generate more than a 50% difference. I just mean that the entire data stream may be different. Not just a few bits in a header.)
The point is that the meta-data about your identity will be merged holographically into the audio data stream.
By "holographically", I don't mean "with lasers" or anything like that. I'm referring to the fact that removing a chunk of a hologram does not remove a chunk of the holographic image it can create, it merely degrades its resolution. You can't mask out part of a holographic image by masking part of the hologram, you have to affect the entire hologram in a way that's difficult to calculate. The same type of data storage could be done digitally with mp3.
The watermark will be much more like analog data storage than digital. It could be really hard to filter it out.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not true for everyone. I always just dowload the whole kernel. It's much easier than patching. I usually get about 120 KB/s to most
mirrors, so 10 MB is only 2 minutes. It's not worth dealing with the patches.
Not everyone uses a modem, remember.
Uh, Alpha's have been available from many OEM vendors for quite some time.
The LDP lists many vendors which sell Alpha Linux systems.
I doubt it. By embracing Linux, they gain a shot at the home market which would never pay for a DU license. It allows them to break into a whole new market.
For people who need servers, though, they'll still be able to sell DU licenses, because DU does have some features that Linux lacks. For example, Digital's Fortran compiler is a lot better than g77. That's still important for people who need to support lots of legacy code.
So they gain in the home market, without hurting their server market too much. Well worth it.
Also worth noting is that Alphas have been available with NT for years now. Embracing NT probably dropped more DU licenses than Linux would, and NT doesn't gain you much of anything on the home front.
I don't like the smell of this thing. I've used the DOS version of this before, back when I still used DOS, but now, I feel differently.
This kind of functionality is much to important to be non-free. I'm afraid that new applications might come out that require something like this. Why write drivers? SciTech will do it for you! Bah!
Avoid this like the plague. Please do not let this become an established product. It could seriously damage the community.
If you wrote code which was derived from GPL'd ext2fs code, then you only have two options. You can not distribute the code to anyone, or you can distribute it under the terms of the GPL. And "anyone" includes to the employer who paid you. If someone contracts you to write GPL software, you can resell/give it to anyone else you like as well. It's perfectly legal.
If you use smail on a Debian system, the configuration script already does this. After smail is configured, it asks the user if he would like to send a test message to the Linux Counter project. If you answer yes, Linux Counter++.
Amen!
These contests are great. I have absolutely no talent in this area, but I love seeing what other people can produce with contests like this and www.irtc.org and so on, but what disappoints me most is that the images produced are always so small! 800x600 doesn't due many of these creations justice. I'd much rather see these contests run at 1600x1200, or at least 1280x1024. I'd even donate CPU cycles for something like that!
I have a hard time imagining how interacting with certain pieces of hardware would work. I mean, if we just consider a PNP sound card, which OS initializes it? When the card generates an interrupt, which OS handles it?
With the price of computers coming down as quickly as they are, I think I'd rather just buy two computers if I really need to run two operating systems concurrently. The cost of a basic headless PC isn't that much more than the $300 asking price for the software and you don't have all of these kinds of headaches. Sounds like a bad idea to me.
The way I understand it, watermarking could only stop piracy if *everything* was watermarked, including ordinary CD's.
Not everyone in the world is ready to switch from CD's to mp3's. There's still a hell of a lot of audio equipment out there which is built to play non-compressed CD's and there's still a demand for traditional compact discs.
The problem is that the entire music distribution industry isn't set up for this. CD's are stamped im mass production. Making each CD unique would drive up the cost immensely, and getting and recording a valid ID from all the teens buying CD's in the mall seems like an impossible task.
But if this is not done, if there is an easy source of non-watermarked data, then pirates will be just as easily able to create non-watermarked mp3's for trade as they are today. Warez site and piracy will not be thwarted in the least.
Forget about trying to remove the watermark. Just buy one CD, compress, upload/download to your heart's content.
Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it?
Not necessarily. It's quite possible that what you'd find if you did this is that all of the bits are different. (Well, not *all*, really, just randomly setting bits won't generate more than a 50% difference. I just mean that the entire data stream may be different. Not just a few bits in a header.)
The point is that the meta-data about your identity will be merged holographically into the audio data stream.
By "holographically", I don't mean "with lasers" or anything like that. I'm referring to the fact that removing a chunk of a hologram does not remove a chunk of the holographic image it can create, it merely degrades its resolution. You can't mask out part of a holographic image by masking part of the hologram, you have to affect the entire hologram in a way that's difficult to calculate. The same type of data storage could be done digitally with mp3.
The watermark will be much more like analog data storage than digital. It could be really hard to filter it out.