The protection scheme is stupid. It just slickly breaks the music CD standard, thus confusing some cd programs. Big deal.
I think all someone has to do is read the cd-rom in raw mode and just read all 1152 bytes (or whatever it is) in a full, 'uncooked' sector and you will be able to copy these cd's
Yes, you are correct -- just about every word in this paper is stolen from others. I don't think Microsoft will ever be able to come up with a single original idea. Plan9 is a shining example of an OS that does exactly what this paper proposes, and is actually deployed and used for day-to-day computing.
*sigh*
I just wish good ideas that were thought of by the best and the brightest (meaning the researchers over at bell labs) weren't largely ignored by the geek masses. Why is it that only after microsoft acknowledges something as relevant, somehow IT departments and people all over the world then begin to take it seriously?
Big deal. So microsoft steals some ideas, takes them for their own, and predicts they will be relevant. It's old news to anyone who has ever even had a cursory interest in OS's, and is downright insulting actually in that Microsoft makes it all sound like they were the first to think of it.
Also, if microsoft manages to implement such an OS as what they propose, who wants to bet that it will be nowhere near as elegant, efficient, consistent, or stable as PLan 9?
I was going to mention plan9 as well. They did this years ago at bell labs. Some of the people that worked on it were the original people that developed Unix. They are, and always were, years ahead of their time.
Erm.. ok. Monitor app. Riight. And I suppose this magical app will intelligently auto-patch your code. Hell, while we're at it why don't we write an app that you can speak to via your microphone and ask it to write a program based on some vague specs. That would be even more useful.
The reason why we can't do it is you can't ask a computer to analyze source code for you, figure out what is going on in the code, and intelligently merge vauge real-world requirements into the source. That requires extremely advanced artificial intelligence -- impossible these days.
Well, if you haven't found an open project, you haven't looked hard enough.
Typically the larger projects are the ones that aleady have so many people involved, in the interests of sanity, code must be rejected and some questions in mailing lists ignored. However, smaller projects are EXTREMELY rewarding and really collaborative on a truly cool level.
If you want an example of some small projects that work well, check out the COMEDI project as well as the RT-Linux project.
Also, if you want to join something with the potential to be cool and sexy, go to rtlab.org and join my project! We are developing a generic scientific experiment interface. The software is built on top of RT-Linux (real-time OS's are sexy!) and the COMEDI data acquisition drivers. This is a great opportunity to work on sexy code, as you get to do both Kernel level programming when working on the RT thread, and user-level programming for the user interface (we use Qt/GUI). Join now!
Email me at calin@rtlab.org if you are interested in finding out more about the software and/or think you can help!
-Calin
Who cares? He's the CEO of Caldera.. BIG DEAL! Am I supposed to be impressed? He, like all management types, is obviously a business troll. He has done nothing to add to the general knowledge or to contribute to OSS personally using his intellect.
Give me interviews with greats like Ritchie, Thompson, Torvalds, Stallman, Wall, etc.. and I will listen to what they have to say! Who cares what some CEO thinks about Linux? Even if he is a CEO of a company that works with Linux, he is still a CEO!
NEWS FLASH: Slashdot is supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Interviews with the faceless CEO of Caldera is neither "News for Nerds", nor does it matter.
I am sure 99.9% of us here on slashdot will agree with that assesment.
Anything this CEO in a monkey suit has to say either puts me to sleep or is as profound as "P implies P".
You are making your little fantasy land of just sending your windoze-bound family members binaries you were running on a sparc sound really credible. However, you are mistaken. Just having a binary that can run on your machine but was compiled for a different OS is NOT going to help you much when moving from sparc/solaris to windows. Case in point: take an intel solaris binary and try running it on the SAME dual-booted machine which booted into win98.
You can't do it.
In fact, I challenge you to even try running binaries compiled with different versions of glibc on the same cpu/kernel combination. Chances are even then you can get a segfault.
Frankly, I really don't know WHAT problems translating CPU's solve. They are yet another marketing gimmick.. and I am afraid of the possibility that one day manufacturers will adopt this technology as a cheap alternative to the real thing. Namely, they build some overly simple CPU and then have it emulate a Pentium, IV, let's say, and try and sell it to us. Half the time our apps won't run too much slower, but sometimes they will. Actually this isn't a bad thing.. it will probably mean we can get cheaper laptops if we want to go with the cheap-plastic-replacement of a CPU.
I would have to concur with other slashdotters on this one: Who the hell cares about binary translation? So they made it a little less slow... who cares? It's still slow and if you can't compile for the target cpu, you probably have bigger issues (such as screwed up licensing, stupid developers, or BOTH).
And what about OS issues? Surely you can't run binaries meant for one CPU A on OS A, using CPU B and OS B. Even if CPU B emulates CPU A. So fine, you say. Just install OS A compiled for CPU A on CPU B and be happy. But at that point.. why not just call the whole thing off? Buy god-damn CPU A and be done with it. Really.. hardware is dirt cheap these days and emulating other CPU's on one CPU doesn't seem as great as it used to seem maybe 10--even 5--years ago.
He is awesome man. The clarity and simplicty of his reply got to the heart of the matter and cut through the crap. Never trust a guy like mundie that likes to use a lot of techno-babel and really complicated sounding ideas to explain how he wants to fuck you up the ass.
Yeah, whatever. It's still government waste. Or do you LIKE paying taxes? Maybe you are still a kid and only mommy and daddy have to worry about that. But one day you will enter the workforce and see how your paycheck gets raped!
Amen brother! It really amazes me how you and I seem to be the only two people who posted that can see through the bullshit in this. WAKE UP PEOPLE!. You should always question the government's motives.. especially when they plan to spend even more of your hard-earned dollars on useless crap!
The government is finding more ways to justify its existance. Who the hell needs them to be involved in the Internet? The internet is doing just fine without this stupid $225 million dollar program. Will YOU see any benefit from this? Will ANYBODY (except for the people in the government)?? I doubt it! wake up and smell the bullshit, cause Uncle Sam lays it on thick every time!!
The military being involved in the internet is one thing (they DID help build the arpanet), but the Legislature should stop thinking of ways to waste money on useless programs. They should just make laws and be humble about it. Who the hell made them the f'ing solver of all the nation's problems which noone knew it had until they came along anyway?
Man it astounds me how good the government is at wasting money! $225 million dollars is a LOT of money when it comes to the internet. Putting up websites is dirt cheap (well, at least as compared to other endeavors).
My suspicion is that this is yet another exciting and politically 'relevant' way for the government to justify itself. You see, if the government can't figure out how to spend the ridiculous amounts of money it collects in taxes, it has a problem. Ergo they create bogus programs noone needs and basically find ways to pork barrel our hard-earned dollars.
I worked for a startup, and with about one tenth of that money (about 25 million) this company was able to put up a full-featured e-commerce site, hire dozens of people, and stay in operations for two years. I expect that for 225 million dollars, the government ought to be able to completely do away with any and all of it's myriad physical offices and do everything online. However, will that happen? NO! Will you see any kind of change or benefit after the government is done spending your money on useless internet functionality? NO! What you may see, down the line (and especially if we get another Democrat in office), is possible tax hikes. After all, all this great stuff the government is doing for YOU isn't free, right? I mean.. since this $225 million dollars will have changed the face of the internet and life on earth as we know it, you owe it to good 'ole Uncle Sam to fork over even more of your already anemic paycheck for the benefit of humanity!
A lot of the slashdot readers are still in school and aren't as aware of how bad the tax situation is. However, you guys will soon join the workforce and end up seeing how, after all is said and done, between the bankers and the rapine the government commits on your paychecks, you end up keeping less than half your money. (After you figure in sales tax and interest and all that.)
MySQL is *NOWHERE NEAR* as robust and evolved as Oracle. Don't dilude yourself. That doesn;t mean MySQL sucks and Oracle rulez. It simply means for some tasks, you have no business using MySQL. Ex: Anything involving transactions.
The most exciting thing that happened was when some junior tech would issue "killall -9" on a Solaris box.
The program 'killall' doesn't come with Solaris. So unless you guys went out of your way to compile and install it (why would you do a thing like that??), those couldn't have been solaris boxes.
Woah.. that's clever.. create some robust perl scripts to extract the images and put them in a holding bin. Then, you weed out the bad ones and maybe validate their categoriczation. Shit.. I think I have a new business idea...
Is that dialing the harddisk anecdote really true? That seems like such a braindead mistake to make!! But I guess even Linus is prone to brain farting once in a while..
Yeah I can't believe how much bad press U9 got. Sure, it had some minor problems.. but the world was really, as you say, immersive and beautifully free-form. The graphics were stunning and the plot was still lightyears more entertaining than most wanna-be titles out there that get better press. Right on!
Haha monitor listings. Now there's a term I haven't heard in a long time. 6502 assembler had it's elegance in simplicity, didn't it?? I am curious--was Ultima 5 developed on the Apple ][ or on the C64 originally?
Hey, so did you get the lead programmer role for U5 because you loved the Ultimas so much and they inspired you to learn 6502 assembly? You should write a book about those good old days!!
Slashdot Mirror
I always love art that is based on chaotic systems. It's really cool how order can arise from chaos, and vice-versa.
I got repeatedly fragged by a guy in UT a few nights ago named madcow. Is that you?
Actually, MAC is just short for media access control. As in the layer. The address part is part of that layer.
The protection scheme is stupid. It just slickly breaks the music CD standard, thus confusing some cd programs. Big deal.
I think all someone has to do is read the cd-rom in raw mode and just read all 1152 bytes (or whatever it is) in a full, 'uncooked' sector and you will be able to copy these cd's
Yes, you are correct -- just about every word in this paper is stolen from others. I don't think Microsoft will ever be able to come up with a single original idea. Plan9 is a shining example of an OS that does exactly what this paper proposes, and is actually deployed and used for day-to-day computing.
*sigh*
I just wish good ideas that were thought of by the best and the brightest (meaning the researchers over at bell labs) weren't largely ignored by the geek masses. Why is it that only after microsoft acknowledges something as relevant, somehow IT departments and people all over the world then begin to take it seriously?
Big deal. So microsoft steals some ideas, takes them for their own, and predicts they will be relevant. It's old news to anyone who has ever even had a cursory interest in OS's, and is downright insulting actually in that Microsoft makes it all sound like they were the first to think of it.
Also, if microsoft manages to implement such an OS as what they propose, who wants to bet that it will be nowhere near as elegant, efficient, consistent, or stable as PLan 9?
I was going to mention plan9 as well. They did this years ago at bell labs. Some of the people that worked on it were the original people that developed Unix. They are, and always were, years ahead of their time.
The reason why we can't do it is you can't ask a computer to analyze source code for you, figure out what is going on in the code, and intelligently merge vauge real-world requirements into the source. That requires extremely advanced artificial intelligence -- impossible these days.
Hell, most humans can't even do that!
Typically the larger projects are the ones that aleady have so many people involved, in the interests of sanity, code must be rejected and some questions in mailing lists ignored. However, smaller projects are EXTREMELY rewarding and really collaborative on a truly cool level.
If you want an example of some small projects that work well, check out the COMEDI project as well as the RT-Linux project.
Also, if you want to join something with the potential to be cool and sexy, go to rtlab.org and join my project! We are developing a generic scientific experiment interface. The software is built on top of RT-Linux (real-time OS's are sexy!) and the COMEDI data acquisition drivers. This is a great opportunity to work on sexy code, as you get to do both Kernel level programming when working on the RT thread, and user-level programming for the user interface (we use Qt/GUI). Join now! Email me at calin@rtlab.org if you are interested in finding out more about the software and/or think you can help! -Calin
4Gigaseconds is the larges for 32bit ints. However, I'll bet 50% of the programs out there use a signed data type.. :(
Steve gilliard is suffering from the BLUB paradox. Read this article by Paul Graham for a good discussion of BLUB.
t
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/sec.tx
Give me interviews with greats like Ritchie, Thompson, Torvalds, Stallman, Wall, etc.. and I will listen to what they have to say! Who cares what some CEO thinks about Linux? Even if he is a CEO of a company that works with Linux, he is still a CEO!
NEWS FLASH: Slashdot is supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Interviews with the faceless CEO of Caldera is neither "News for Nerds", nor does it matter.
I am sure 99.9% of us here on slashdot will agree with that assesment.
Anything this CEO in a monkey suit has to say either puts me to sleep or is as profound as "P implies P".
Well, you don't HAVE to use the adobe reader.. but point well taken!
You are making your little fantasy land of just sending your windoze-bound family members binaries you were running on a sparc sound really credible. However, you are mistaken. Just having a binary that can run on your machine but was compiled for a different OS is NOT going to help you much when moving from sparc/solaris to windows. Case in point: take an intel solaris binary and try running it on the SAME dual-booted machine which booted into win98.
You can't do it.
In fact, I challenge you to even try running binaries compiled with different versions of glibc on the same cpu/kernel combination. Chances are even then you can get a segfault.
Frankly, I really don't know WHAT problems translating CPU's solve. They are yet another marketing gimmick.. and I am afraid of the possibility that one day manufacturers will adopt this technology as a cheap alternative to the real thing. Namely, they build some overly simple CPU and then have it emulate a Pentium, IV, let's say, and try and sell it to us. Half the time our apps won't run too much slower, but sometimes they will. Actually this isn't a bad thing.. it will probably mean we can get cheaper laptops if we want to go with the cheap-plastic-replacement of a CPU.
I would have to concur with other slashdotters on this one: Who the hell cares about binary translation? So they made it a little less slow... who cares? It's still slow and if you can't compile for the target cpu, you probably have bigger issues (such as screwed up licensing, stupid developers, or BOTH).
And what about OS issues? Surely you can't run binaries meant for one CPU A on OS A, using CPU B and OS B. Even if CPU B emulates CPU A. So fine, you say. Just install OS A compiled for CPU A on CPU B and be happy. But at that point.. why not just call the whole thing off? Buy god-damn CPU A and be done with it. Really.. hardware is dirt cheap these days and emulating other CPU's on one CPU doesn't seem as great as it used to seem maybe 10--even 5--years ago.
He is awesome man. The clarity and simplicty of his reply got to the heart of the matter and cut through the crap. Never trust a guy like mundie that likes to use a lot of techno-babel and really complicated sounding ideas to explain how he wants to fuck you up the ass.
Yeah, whatever. It's still government waste. Or do you LIKE paying taxes? Maybe you are still a kid and only mommy and daddy have to worry about that. But one day you will enter the workforce and see how your paycheck gets raped!
The government is finding more ways to justify its existance. Who the hell needs them to be involved in the Internet? The internet is doing just fine without this stupid $225 million dollar program. Will YOU see any benefit from this? Will ANYBODY (except for the people in the government)?? I doubt it! wake up and smell the bullshit, cause Uncle Sam lays it on thick every time!!
The military being involved in the internet is one thing (they DID help build the arpanet), but the Legislature should stop thinking of ways to waste money on useless programs. They should just make laws and be humble about it. Who the hell made them the f'ing solver of all the nation's problems which noone knew it had until they came along anyway?
My suspicion is that this is yet another exciting and politically 'relevant' way for the government to justify itself. You see, if the government can't figure out how to spend the ridiculous amounts of money it collects in taxes, it has a problem. Ergo they create bogus programs noone needs and basically find ways to pork barrel our hard-earned dollars.
I worked for a startup, and with about one tenth of that money (about 25 million) this company was able to put up a full-featured e-commerce site, hire dozens of people, and stay in operations for two years. I expect that for 225 million dollars, the government ought to be able to completely do away with any and all of it's myriad physical offices and do everything online. However, will that happen? NO! Will you see any kind of change or benefit after the government is done spending your money on useless internet functionality? NO! What you may see, down the line (and especially if we get another Democrat in office), is possible tax hikes. After all, all this great stuff the government is doing for YOU isn't free, right? I mean.. since this $225 million dollars will have changed the face of the internet and life on earth as we know it, you owe it to good 'ole Uncle Sam to fork over even more of your already anemic paycheck for the benefit of humanity!
A lot of the slashdot readers are still in school and aren't as aware of how bad the tax situation is. However, you guys will soon join the workforce and end up seeing how, after all is said and done, between the bankers and the rapine the government commits on your paychecks, you end up keeping less than half your money. (After you figure in sales tax and interest and all that.)
MySQL is *NOWHERE NEAR* as robust and evolved as Oracle. Don't dilude yourself. That doesn;t mean MySQL sucks and Oracle rulez. It simply means for some tasks, you have no business using MySQL. Ex: Anything involving transactions.
-Calin
it's slow as molasses. But, it's neat cause it's java.
The program 'killall' doesn't come with Solaris. So unless you guys went out of your way to compile and install it (why would you do a thing like that??), those couldn't have been solaris boxes.
Woah.. that's clever.. create some robust perl scripts to extract the images and put them in a holding bin. Then, you weed out the bad ones and maybe validate their categoriczation. Shit.. I think I have a new business idea...
Is that dialing the harddisk anecdote really true? That seems like such a braindead mistake to make!! But I guess even Linus is prone to brain farting once in a while..
Yeah I can't believe how much bad press U9 got. Sure, it had some minor problems.. but the world was really, as you say, immersive and beautifully free-form. The graphics were stunning and the plot was still lightyears more entertaining than most wanna-be titles out there that get better press. Right on!
Haha monitor listings. Now there's a term I haven't heard in a long time. 6502 assembler had it's elegance in simplicity, didn't it?? I am curious--was Ultima 5 developed on the Apple ][ or on the C64 originally? Hey, so did you get the lead programmer role for U5 because you loved the Ultimas so much and they inspired you to learn 6502 assembly? You should write a book about those good old days!!