Let's see. I could do media editing on my 32" monitors or on a 12" mini screen. Sounds like an awesome workflow.
No you can do it on both and just use the most appropriate form factor for the given situation. I tend not to take 32" monitors (and the accompanying computer and peripherals) with me when I leave my desk.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code. That's like saying one country is "more free" because they don't restrict people from owning slaves.
That's a nonsense argument. If somebody creates a non-free derived work you have no less freedom than you had before, even if you choose to use that non-free derived work you still have no less freedom than you had before. This idea that something that you never had has been lost is trumpeted by restrictive-license advocates and Hollywood alike, as is the advocation of copyright law to enforce this rubbish you should be able to exert control of your work in perpetuity after it has been distributed.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code.
I've never understood this logic. Nothing from the original code is lost or diminished in any way. It's guaranteed to remain free and open in perpetuity.
That is exactly right. Hollywood tries the same line of backwards logic in their "lost profits" drivel that restrictive-license advocates do with their "lost freedoms" arguments and it is complete nonsense. You cannot take away something that never existed in the first place.
I don't necessarily think GPL is bad or wrong, but it seems to have different priorities than permissive licenses. I feel like it's primary aim is to promote the growth of open source, whereas the other licenses only seek to preserve themselves as open source.
The benefits of open source should be self-evident, if you need to use restrictions like in the GPL to force it upon people then perhaps the benefits are not as great as some people pontificate. As you say, divergent, closed forks simply make it more difficult and costly to maintain and generally have very little benefit given they can be included in software without forcing their license on other parts of the software.
So... you would rather they released code under a licence that lets licensees deny the same freedoms bestowed upon them when they release a work that uses it?
No, they have exactly the same freedoms. If a project is MIT-licensed then everybody has the same freedoms to it regardless of the license of any derived project. If somebody creates a derived work you lose nothing, you're making the same idiotic argument the RIAA/MPAA make about "lost profits" and it's the same advocation of copyright law to enforce their draconian business model as it is for enforcement of the GPL.
Stop trying to impose your own control over the thing after you have distributed it.
Always wondered how binary blobs are even legal with the GPLv2
Because the kernel isn't GPLv2, it's often lauded as the biggest success story of the GPL but in fact it has a very specific exception which would otherwise put any software with an incompatible license making syscalls to the kernel in violation of the GPL.
This is one of the things that has led to the Linux kernel being so successful.
Its always been the same issue, over and over and over. If you need sources for 3rd party closed drivers, you cant update the kernel without them.
This needs to be fixed. This will fix everything, older android can be updated, linux systems like phones and tablets can be updated, forever.
You don't need the sources if a kernel module to load the binary driver is provided (like how the nVidia linux drivers work) or if the kernel provides a stable ABI (like the way Windows works). It's nice to say "well every manufacturer of hardware should just release all their driver code as open source" but it's just not realistic, and anyway somebody has to then maintain that driver code and there is a cost to doing that.
That language actually does a lot more harm than good. I know it makes these corporations sound very evil to say that they "sell your data" but the problem with doing that is it normalizes that idea and so people think that is what they are doing now and see the consequences of it.
We now have anonymized data being collected, aggregated and then used in an advertising service and the consequences of that should absolutely not be attributed to the much worse idea of them "selling your data".
I mean if these companies turned around and said "now we're going to sell your data" you don't want the general populace saying "oh ok, no problem we were under the impression you've been doing that all along".
Is it possible to install and run linux on these MS surface machines?
Yes, it is. You might not have thought it if you'd read all the conspiracy theorist comments about SecureBoot was going to kill other operating systems years ago (despite the red-faced, raging posters that never actually came to pass) but indeed on this 6th generation of Microsoft's own hardware (which they could quite justifiably limit to Windows if they wanted to) you can disable SecureBoot and install any operating system you like or you can leave it enabled and install a SecureBoot version of any other OS.
Would they re-invent WINE or become contributors to it?
I wouldn't think so, the Win32 API would remain and probably have some sort of Linux Subsystem for Windows (the opposite of the Windows Subsystem for Linux) so the kernel could be switched. Then most likely new APIs and functionality would go through WSL so they could run on a Windows kernel but be switched to a Linux kernel.
So what's wrong with that? Why are some companies so incapable of creating products that are intuitive and then why is it there are so many apologists for those inept companies that go on to blame the users?
In any case a big part of it is that in so many non-trivial products these days the behaviour and interactions are software-defined so updates would make a manual pointless anyway, for example you could provide a manual that walked through all the features of the iPhone 5s when it was released but it would be completely irrelevant for that product with its updates today.
This is still one of the biggest problems for Linux, no matter how easy it is to install the general populace is still made up of people like you that can't comprehend installing a different operating system or not using the system as it came out of the box.
I think that's probably one of the more interesting things here, for all the years and years of paranoia and fear-mongering posts here about how Microsoft is the devil and will use SecureBoot to lock out alternative operating systems not only has that not happened but even now at the 6th generation of Microsoft's own hardware you can still disable SecureBoot and install Linux. Not only did the conspiracy theories not come to pass with OEMs but it didn't even happen with Microsoft's own Surface devices.
So do away with restrictive, copyleft licenses all together? I'd certainly agree with that, but if you take a look at any of the BSD vs GPL kind of shitfights you'll find a lot of people disagree.
There's nothing here that justifies DRM or copyright. They aren't justifiable.
If we didn't have copyright there would be nothing to enforce the freedom of free software. Device vendors could take free code, augment it, bundle it up in devices and never distribute the code or allow it to be changed.
If you can posit why a CUDA application executed via a privilege escalation bug is a risk to Web Render feature of Mozilla any more than to any other application then, or indeed what about Web Render makes it particularly prone to some unspecified GPU-based attack then I'm willing to listen but I'm afraid it's pretty clear you don't - and likely lack the capacity to - understand. I'm afraid I can't fix your stupid, sorry.
Privilege escalation bugs that allow arbitrary execution of code on the GPU or any other processor are of concern but there is nothing that you can seem to point to that makes Web Render any more susceptible to such things that any other code.
Or do you make decisions drawing from years of experience driving cars and what you see to either side and in the rearview mirror and your side mirrors and what you see further down the road and, dare I say it, common sense?
You seem very confused, you've posted links demonstrating that a privileged application can map kernel memory and run a CUDA program that can then access that memory, we already know that, that's not news (well actually it does seem to be news to you). Whether the browser uses the GPU to render something (which also has been done for a long time and is not a new thing) or not has no bearing whatsoever on that at all.
There's nothing fundamentally about Firefox's Web Render that makes it any more or less vulnerable to the keylogger you linked than any other software. Your posts suggest you think there is, you are wrong.
Again, this is not about "letting web sites run arbitrary code on your GPU". But more to the point you obviously didn't even read that paper. In order to do that you need to first compromise the system at the root level so you can get access to the memory holding the keyboard buffer then run a CUDA program with admin privileges to map that memory to the GPU and execute the compute kernel to read that memory. i.e. to do this you need to have completely compromised the operating system already.
Nice strawman but that's a very different thing to "letting web sites run arbitrary code on your GPU" which is absolutely not the goal here but if that's really the way that you're framing it then the answer is the implications are much less severe than letting web sites run arbitrary code on your CPU.
Why do I suspect those numbers predate the 1950X Threadripper (which would tear your GPUs arms off in the hexakaidecathalon).
I really don't think the word "sucks" should be applied to an elite athlete with 4% body fat who runs for a living, just because his pipes are too studly to ace the ultramarathon.
The reason you don't use your CPU to rasterize scenes in games is, quite frankly, because it sucks at it. The same thing applies here, of course you use the graphics processing unit to do this work because that is exactly what it is suited for and the CPU, while capable of doing it, is comparatively sucky at it. It doesn't matter how much praise you think a 1950XThreadripper deserves the fact is it is comparatively terrible at this task.
Yes most people use a web browser, but it's the "mostly nothing else" bit that is important because most people often use other things and even if they don't use them that often the fact that they can is part of the reason people have PCs because they can do all those things, you can then sacrifice some of that flexibility with a laptop and then further again with a tablet and further than that with a smartphone. It all depends on where your line of compromise is.
Which leads to Bill gates recent rant on capitalism without capital , software breaks the capitalist idea of supply and demand once made software has virtually unlimited supply and any demand can be supplied through almost instant duplication.
That's not just software, it is anything that can be represented in digital form whether that's software, photographs, music, video, books, magazines, etc... The general business model is for the cost of producing it to be amortized across the people who want it. The benefit being that you profit by serving market needs in that the more popular it is the more profit you can make.
Until we make replicator technology from star trek the same won't happen for the manufacturing industry.
That's only partially correct. You don't really think the cost of manufactured goods are just the raw materials + the cost to replicate the original do you? There is a huge amount of R&D that goes into not just the product design and development but also the manufacturing process and equipment, all of this gets amortized across the individual products that are made. You just notice it less because it's wrapped up in the production cost.
Apple does a similar thing with its software, the OS is given away for free but tied to their hardware. It isn't given away for free because the reproduction costs are zero or because the development cost is sunk but because some of the inflated price of the hardware is directed to funding development of the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend not to take 32" monitors (and the accompanying computer and peripherals) with me when I leave my desk.
Yeah, because forward thinking professionals do media editing on the go. "Static" media editing is so very passé. Millennials do not approve it.
I don't know what you mean by "on the go" but certainly I do work in places other than my desk, like when I'm travelling. What's wrong with that?
Let's see. I could do media editing on my 32" monitors or on a 12" mini screen. Sounds like an awesome workflow.
No you can do it on both and just use the most appropriate form factor for the given situation. I tend not to take 32" monitors (and the accompanying computer and peripherals) with me when I leave my desk.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code. That's like saying one country is "more free" because they don't restrict people from owning slaves.
That's a nonsense argument. If somebody creates a non-free derived work you have no less freedom than you had before, even if you choose to use that non-free derived work you still have no less freedom than you had before. This idea that something that you never had has been lost is trumpeted by restrictive-license advocates and Hollywood alike, as is the advocation of copyright law to enforce this rubbish you should be able to exert control of your work in perpetuity after it has been distributed.
Your version of freedom is giving people the right to take away other people's rights by locking down code.
I've never understood this logic. Nothing from the original code is lost or diminished in any way. It's guaranteed to remain free and open in perpetuity.
That is exactly right. Hollywood tries the same line of backwards logic in their "lost profits" drivel that restrictive-license advocates do with their "lost freedoms" arguments and it is complete nonsense. You cannot take away something that never existed in the first place.
I don't necessarily think GPL is bad or wrong, but it seems to have different priorities than permissive licenses. I feel like it's primary aim is to promote the growth of open source, whereas the other licenses only seek to preserve themselves as open source.
The benefits of open source should be self-evident, if you need to use restrictions like in the GPL to force it upon people then perhaps the benefits are not as great as some people pontificate. As you say, divergent, closed forks simply make it more difficult and costly to maintain and generally have very little benefit given they can be included in software without forcing their license on other parts of the software.
So... you would rather they released code under a licence that lets licensees deny the same freedoms bestowed upon them when they release a work that uses it?
No, they have exactly the same freedoms. If a project is MIT-licensed then everybody has the same freedoms to it regardless of the license of any derived project. If somebody creates a derived work you lose nothing, you're making the same idiotic argument the RIAA/MPAA make about "lost profits" and it's the same advocation of copyright law to enforce their draconian business model as it is for enforcement of the GPL.
Stop trying to impose your own control over the thing after you have distributed it.
That's the reason for the Fair Repair Act that explicitly prohibits software locks on repairs, something Apple is actively lobbying against.
Always wondered how binary blobs are even legal with the GPLv2
Because the kernel isn't GPLv2, it's often lauded as the biggest success story of the GPL but in fact it has a very specific exception which would otherwise put any software with an incompatible license making syscalls to the kernel in violation of the GPL.
This is one of the things that has led to the Linux kernel being so successful.
Its always been the same issue, over and over and over. If you need sources for 3rd party closed drivers, you cant update the kernel without them.
This needs to be fixed. This will fix everything, older android can be updated, linux systems like phones and tablets can be updated, forever.
You don't need the sources if a kernel module to load the binary driver is provided (like how the nVidia linux drivers work) or if the kernel provides a stable ABI (like the way Windows works). It's nice to say "well every manufacturer of hardware should just release all their driver code as open source" but it's just not realistic, and anyway somebody has to then maintain that driver code and there is a cost to doing that.
That language actually does a lot more harm than good. I know it makes these corporations sound very evil to say that they "sell your data" but the problem with doing that is it normalizes that idea and so people think that is what they are doing now and see the consequences of it.
We now have anonymized data being collected, aggregated and then used in an advertising service and the consequences of that should absolutely not be attributed to the much worse idea of them "selling your data".
I mean if these companies turned around and said "now we're going to sell your data" you don't want the general populace saying "oh ok, no problem we were under the impression you've been doing that all along".
Is it possible to install and run linux on these MS surface machines?
Yes, it is. You might not have thought it if you'd read all the conspiracy theorist comments about SecureBoot was going to kill other operating systems years ago (despite the red-faced, raging posters that never actually came to pass) but indeed on this 6th generation of Microsoft's own hardware (which they could quite justifiably limit to Windows if they wanted to) you can disable SecureBoot and install any operating system you like or you can leave it enabled and install a SecureBoot version of any other OS.
Would they re-invent WINE or become contributors to it?
I wouldn't think so, the Win32 API would remain and probably have some sort of Linux Subsystem for Windows (the opposite of the Windows Subsystem for Linux) so the kernel could be switched. Then most likely new APIs and functionality would go through WSL so they could run on a Windows kernel but be switched to a Linux kernel.
So what's wrong with that? Why are some companies so incapable of creating products that are intuitive and then why is it there are so many apologists for those inept companies that go on to blame the users?
In any case a big part of it is that in so many non-trivial products these days the behaviour and interactions are software-defined so updates would make a manual pointless anyway, for example you could provide a manual that walked through all the features of the iPhone 5s when it was released but it would be completely irrelevant for that product with its updates today.
I won't consider them.
This is still one of the biggest problems for Linux, no matter how easy it is to install the general populace is still made up of people like you that can't comprehend installing a different operating system or not using the system as it came out of the box.
So load ubuntu on a surface?
I think that's probably one of the more interesting things here, for all the years and years of paranoia and fear-mongering posts here about how Microsoft is the devil and will use SecureBoot to lock out alternative operating systems not only has that not happened but even now at the 6th generation of Microsoft's own hardware you can still disable SecureBoot and install Linux. Not only did the conspiracy theories not come to pass with OEMs but it didn't even happen with Microsoft's own Surface devices.
So do away with restrictive, copyleft licenses all together? I'd certainly agree with that, but if you take a look at any of the BSD vs GPL kind of shitfights you'll find a lot of people disagree.
There's nothing here that justifies DRM or copyright. They aren't justifiable.
If we didn't have copyright there would be nothing to enforce the freedom of free software. Device vendors could take free code, augment it, bundle it up in devices and never distribute the code or allow it to be changed.
If you can posit why a CUDA application executed via a privilege escalation bug is a risk to Web Render feature of Mozilla any more than to any other application then, or indeed what about Web Render makes it particularly prone to some unspecified GPU-based attack then I'm willing to listen but I'm afraid it's pretty clear you don't - and likely lack the capacity to - understand. I'm afraid I can't fix your stupid, sorry.
Privilege escalation bugs that allow arbitrary execution of code on the GPU or any other processor are of concern but there is nothing that you can seem to point to that makes Web Render any more susceptible to such things that any other code.
Or do you make decisions drawing from years of experience driving cars and what you see to either side and in the rearview mirror and your side mirrors and what you see further down the road and, dare I say it, common sense?
You seem very confused, you've posted links demonstrating that a privileged application can map kernel memory and run a CUDA program that can then access that memory, we already know that, that's not news (well actually it does seem to be news to you). Whether the browser uses the GPU to render something (which also has been done for a long time and is not a new thing) or not has no bearing whatsoever on that at all.
There's nothing fundamentally about Firefox's Web Render that makes it any more or less vulnerable to the keylogger you linked than any other software. Your posts suggest you think there is, you are wrong.
Again, this is not about "letting web sites run arbitrary code on your GPU". But more to the point you obviously didn't even read that paper. In order to do that you need to first compromise the system at the root level so you can get access to the memory holding the keyboard buffer then run a CUDA program with admin privileges to map that memory to the GPU and execute the compute kernel to read that memory. i.e. to do this you need to have completely compromised the operating system already.
Nice strawman but that's a very different thing to "letting web sites run arbitrary code on your GPU" which is absolutely not the goal here but if that's really the way that you're framing it then the answer is the implications are much less severe than letting web sites run arbitrary code on your CPU.
Why do I suspect those numbers predate the 1950X Threadripper (which would tear your GPUs arms off in the hexakaidecathalon).
I really don't think the word "sucks" should be applied to an elite athlete with 4% body fat who runs for a living, just because his pipes are too studly to ace the ultramarathon.
The reason you don't use your CPU to rasterize scenes in games is, quite frankly, because it sucks at it. The same thing applies here, of course you use the graphics processing unit to do this work because that is exactly what it is suited for and the CPU, while capable of doing it, is comparatively sucky at it. It doesn't matter how much praise you think a 1950XThreadripper deserves the fact is it is comparatively terrible at this task.
What are the security implications of letting web sites run arbitrary code on your GPU?
This article is about the web browser using the GPU for rendering, not about web sites running arbitrary code on the GPU.
I hope this is just an example rather than a measured result, because that would be drawing massive power.
Why would it be drawing massive power? This is leveraging the GPU to do things it does well instead of putting them on the CPU that does them poorly.
My mom uses a browser and mostly nothing else.
Yes most people use a web browser, but it's the "mostly nothing else" bit that is important because most people often use other things and even if they don't use them that often the fact that they can is part of the reason people have PCs because they can do all those things, you can then sacrifice some of that flexibility with a laptop and then further again with a tablet and further than that with a smartphone. It all depends on where your line of compromise is.
Which leads to Bill gates recent rant on capitalism without capital , software breaks the capitalist idea of supply and demand once made software has virtually unlimited supply and any demand can be supplied through almost instant duplication.
That's not just software, it is anything that can be represented in digital form whether that's software, photographs, music, video, books, magazines, etc... The general business model is for the cost of producing it to be amortized across the people who want it. The benefit being that you profit by serving market needs in that the more popular it is the more profit you can make.
Until we make replicator technology from star trek the same won't happen for the manufacturing industry.
That's only partially correct. You don't really think the cost of manufactured goods are just the raw materials + the cost to replicate the original do you? There is a huge amount of R&D that goes into not just the product design and development but also the manufacturing process and equipment, all of this gets amortized across the individual products that are made. You just notice it less because it's wrapped up in the production cost.
Apple does a similar thing with its software, the OS is given away for free but tied to their hardware. It isn't given away for free because the reproduction costs are zero or because the development cost is sunk but because some of the inflated price of the hardware is directed to funding development of the software.