At least SuSE comes with XEN, but it's pretty much unusable. The idea of mere users setting up something that works like Parallels on Mac is just completely out of the question with the way this stuff needs to be configured.
You could always just use VMWare Server. Free (as in beer), easy to use, and doesn't require hardware virtualisation support for 32bit guests.
No, man - it's *more* stable, like a three legged stool as opposed to a wobbly chair that you have to put a bit of folded up paper under one of the legs.
Three spikes on your speakers, three bolts on your hard drive, three cores in your CPU.
Yeah, that moves your vulnerability away from the hobbyist tier and into the professional tier, but honestly, which one scares you more?
Er, hobbyist. Because there's lots of them. Unless you are *really* paranoid or *really* radical then you really don't need to worry about professionals. They will probably be a lot better off breaking in and planting on your wires or a keylogger anyway.
Absenting a keylogger, ssh/SSL should see you right in any event.
Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.
Hmm, surely the "infamous 'binary blob'" problems is where you are running a binary blob on your computer's CPU (like nVidia drivers, or HAL). This is just a firmware upload. If your card had a ROM on it then it would be just be running a 'binary blob' that you wouldn't ever see - almost every card will have some sort of firmware on it.
The good thing about uploadable firmware is that you can upgrade the firmware on your card with a reboot/module reload and not have to reflash, or replace a chip.
The (possibly) bad thing about uploadable firmware is getting the firmware image in the first place - is it freely redistributable? Can it be gotten off the driver CD/driver download without a copy Windows?
Firmware is just firmware - it runs on a different CPU and only has access to the device. Binary blobs run in your kernel space and could (potentially) mess with anything on your system.
Hmmm, that kind of sounded like I was calling the parent a zealot - that was not my intention. The post was actually refreshingly free of zealotry and seemed really quite balanced - in contrast to the bulk of comments about the BBC/iPlayer who seem to think that they can change the reality of the situation by just repeatedly shouting "Put it out in a DRM free format! Waah!".
Seeing as Apple now use x86 and Linux runs on it there is no reason why the Windows DLLs couldn't be embedded into iPlayer allowing it to run on these platforms. It works for me with mplayer and the DLLs anyway. So that's the technical.
I suspect that as iPlayer is still a beta they are testing the network side of the code with the largest section of the audience first and will sort out something with Microsoft to run DRMed Windows Media on other x86 platforms - legally.
I do wish all the zealots would remember that the the Beeb don't own all the content so can't just make it unencumbered and that the damn thing is still just a beta - don't expect support for world+dog yet.
So I don't think it's impossible. Maybe unpossible.
But it's a hassle and most people aren't going to do that - they probably won't even realise that it is there in the first place.
Music companies seem to be smelling the coffee. DRM would never work because you only need one clever person to circumvent it and then it will turn up on P2P for everyone to see. Conversely, with watermarking you only need one stupid person to put their unstripped content on P2P and you have found the culprit.
I am no friend of Microsoft, I've been Linux/BSD only for 10 years and dual booted before that, but that said I do wish the FSF would STFU on this one.
The software is in beta. BETA!
The beeb have said that they will support other platforms, and I'm sure they will, but let them finish their testing before beating up on them for christ's sake.
They have got all sorts of pressures from content owners and probably Equity for repeat fees so they can't just make the thing "open" because you could just bypass the controls.
The thing only allows you to catch up on the last 7 days anyway - if you are geeky enough to run Linux you can get a DVB-T tuner for under 20 quid and run MythTV and get better quality than iPlayer will probably give you.
A Microsoft solution lets them get to 90 of the audience - they can *really* test the networking side of stuff with a known configuration and not have to worry about a handful of crazy Linux users running disparate distros.
Who's to say they are not talking to Microsoft to get the WMV DLLs shipped with a Linux version and link into them? Mplayer seems to do it happily. The BBC are probably one of the few organisations who could get Microsoft to go along with this kind of thing.
For fucks sake I wish people would just shut up and let them get on with their testing. When the full service is running and a few months have gone by and there's still nothing else supported then, fair enough, complain then. But let them finish the beta program at least you petulant bastards.
Yeah, sadly though the "computer industry" is not an independant entity.
For example telecommunications is tightly coupled to computers, so how do you square the use of kilo/mega/giga etc against bandwidth measurement? Telecoms is inherently physics, and physics surely does give a rat's ass about SI units.
I do find it irksome to have to think about stuff in different way with these prefixes, but a sensible conversation about how to deal with it is called for, not childish hectoring and references to rodents backsides.
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is an interesting thing - it only happens with items that can be duplicated and sold at a price substantially below the price of the original product. If the record companies sold CDs for 69 cents each then the "pirates" wouldn't bother with music CDs. The record companies would never willingly reveal their cost of production - but you can safely assume that it's much less than a dollar. When they over-price the finished product at 20 dollars they create their own piracy problem.
Whilst I agree with most of your post, this is a specious argument - of course anyone with CD duplication facilities can knock out copies for cents but then they didn't actually have to produce the content on the CDs. Once you factor in the amount of time and money spent on rehearsal, recording, (audio) production, artwork, promotion, advertising, warehousing, distribution and THEN duplication the figure is going to be much higher.
Don't get me wrong, I think CDs are too pricey, but by the time it has got to the stores there is usually a markup of close to 100%. Big artists and big record companies do make a lot of money, but smaller bands and labels don't make much - there is a limited amount of punters who are going to be into your music, just dropping the price low won't result in vastly more sales.
I don't listen to "pirated" music. I want to pay a fair price for music. If I think it is too expensive then I'll wait until I see it cheaper. Stores like Fopp in the UK selling stuff for £5 revitalised my CD buying (shame they went bust by buying up too many stores much too quickly). I'm not going to to pay £30 for 2 CDs - I'll just not buy them and keep my money, but I'll regularly pay £30 for 5 or 6 CDs.
If smaller artists don't make enough money then they will go back to their day jobs and small labels will go out of business, manufactured bands will be the only "safe" things that the larger labels will back and we will all be the poorer for it. Consumers need to be grown up enough to realise that at the end of the day someone needs to make enough money out or recording this album that they can afford to to feed themselves, even make a better wage than flipping burgers or waiting tables. You aren't going to get the music for "free" (or even next to free) forever - no income, no artists.
I think the record industry needs to wise up and lower prices, but also anyone that thinks of themselves as a supporter of artists needs to put their money where their mouth is and pony up a reasonable price for stuff. If you do actually buy a fair amount of stuff (no-one could afford to buy *everything* they might like to) then I see no problem downloading music too (believe me, the artists and label people do it plenty), but it's the leeches who just download stuff and justify their leeching by railing against the nebulous music industry who are really doing the damage.
Pay a fair price for your music. Enjoy responsibly. Stay in school.
There's only really one person who might sit in the intersection of "been in space" and "reads slashdot", so unless Shuttleworth is reading this you just wasted a minute of your life that you will never get back;)
Personally I wouldn't buy an Apple desktop, because I would built my own PC.
Buying a laptop would be a different matter however. If you buy a laptop you are pretty much buying an operating system too. I would much rather buy a UNIX based OS which, if some bit of hardware doesn't quite work right under Linux, which is ofter quite likely with a laptop, I can get to work on the supported OS and not have to run Windows to do it.
I would really like to be able to get some (self-compiled) OS X command line applications (like afconvert) to work under Linux or Darwin (which I could run under a virtual machine) by copying the CoreAudio, etc., frameworks across.
If anyone has managed to do this I would be extremely interested to hear about it:) I had tried under Darwin, but not managed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indiana University's mirror is still going strong:
...
Not for long
The IFPI use ifpi.org as their canonical domain.
Presumably IFPI let it slip (assuming that they once owned it), someone got it and passed it on to TPB.
I noticed that Virgin once let virgin.net slip back in the 90's - wish I had snaffled that
A "vanity label" is known as an imprint in book or record publishing, and may be used to differentiate between genres of music.
;)
Not *necessarily* to project the impression of a more personal experience
It doesn't work that well. They guy on the left looks all wonky and strange.
At least SuSE comes with XEN, but it's pretty much unusable. The idea of mere users setting up something that works like Parallels on Mac is just completely out of the question with the way this stuff needs to be configured.
You could always just use VMWare Server. Free (as in beer), easy to use, and doesn't require hardware virtualisation support for 32bit guests.
Well, at least they don't shoot demonstrators in the US.
Do whet they used to do with the people who would oversee production of nitroglycerin - give him a stool with two legs.
No, man - it's *more* stable, like a three legged stool as opposed to a wobbly chair that you have to put a bit of folded up paper under one of the legs.
Three spikes on your speakers, three bolts on your hard drive, three cores in your CPU.
Yeah, that moves your vulnerability away from the hobbyist tier and into the professional tier, but honestly, which one scares you more?
Er, hobbyist. Because there's lots of them. Unless you are *really* paranoid or *really* radical then you really don't need to worry about professionals. They will probably be a lot better off breaking in and planting on your wires or a keylogger anyway.
Absenting a keylogger, ssh/SSL should see you right in any event.
Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.
Hmm, surely the "infamous 'binary blob'" problems is where you are running a binary blob on your computer's CPU (like nVidia drivers, or HAL). This is just a firmware upload. If your card had a ROM on it then it would be just be running a 'binary blob' that you wouldn't ever see - almost every card will have some sort of firmware on it.
The good thing about uploadable firmware is that you can upgrade the firmware on your card with a reboot/module reload and not have to reflash, or replace a chip.
The (possibly) bad thing about uploadable firmware is getting the firmware image in the first place - is it freely redistributable? Can it be gotten off the driver CD/driver download without a copy Windows?
Firmware is just firmware - it runs on a different CPU and only has access to the device. Binary blobs run in your kernel space and could (potentially) mess with anything on your system.
Hmmm, that kind of sounded like I was calling the parent a zealot - that was not my intention. The post was actually refreshingly free of zealotry and seemed really quite balanced - in contrast to the bulk of comments about the BBC/iPlayer who seem to think that they can change the reality of the situation by just repeatedly shouting "Put it out in a DRM free format! Waah!".
Seeing as Apple now use x86 and Linux runs on it there is no reason why the Windows DLLs couldn't be embedded into iPlayer allowing it to run on these platforms. It works for me with mplayer and the DLLs anyway. So that's the technical.
I suspect that as iPlayer is still a beta they are testing the network side of the code with the largest section of the audience first and will sort out something with Microsoft to run DRMed Windows Media on other x86 platforms - legally.
I do wish all the zealots would remember that the the Beeb don't own all the content so can't just make it unencumbered and that the damn thing is still just a beta - don't expect support for world+dog yet.
So I don't think it's impossible. Maybe unpossible.
Shame you spent so long working on your acrostic that you missed the 1st post
Next time I suggest your starting point be "Eighth Post"
But it's a hassle and most people aren't going to do that - they probably won't even realise that it is there in the first place.
Music companies seem to be smelling the coffee. DRM would never work because you only need one clever person to circumvent it and then it will turn up on P2P for everyone to see. Conversely, with watermarking you only need one stupid person to put their unstripped content on P2P and you have found the culprit.
It may be trivial to remove, but the average consumer will be too lazy/inept to remove it.
I am no friend of Microsoft, I've been Linux/BSD only for 10 years and dual booted before that, but that said I do wish the FSF would STFU on this one.
The software is in beta. BETA!
The beeb have said that they will support other platforms, and I'm sure they will, but let them finish their testing before beating up on them for christ's sake.
They have got all sorts of pressures from content owners and probably Equity for repeat fees so they can't just make the thing "open" because you could just bypass the controls.
The thing only allows you to catch up on the last 7 days anyway - if you are geeky enough to run Linux you can get a DVB-T tuner for under 20 quid and run MythTV and get better quality than iPlayer will probably give you.
A Microsoft solution lets them get to 90 of the audience - they can *really* test the networking side of stuff with a known configuration and not have to worry about a handful of crazy Linux users running disparate distros.
Who's to say they are not talking to Microsoft to get the WMV DLLs shipped with a Linux version and link into them? Mplayer seems to do it happily. The BBC are probably one of the few organisations who could get Microsoft to go along with this kind of thing.
For fucks sake I wish people would just shut up and let them get on with their testing. When the full service is running and a few months have gone by and there's still nothing else supported then, fair enough, complain then. But let them finish the beta program at least you petulant bastards.
Yeah, sadly though the "computer industry" is not an independant entity.
For example telecommunications is tightly coupled to computers, so how do you square the use of kilo/mega/giga etc against bandwidth measurement? Telecoms is inherently physics, and physics surely does give a rat's ass about SI units.
I do find it irksome to have to think about stuff in different way with these prefixes, but a sensible conversation about how to deal with it is called for, not childish hectoring and references to rodents backsides.
I was hoping that might be the case too.
You'll probably need to have a mouse grafted on under your right arm though
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is an interesting thing - it only happens with items that can be duplicated and sold at a price substantially below the price of the original product. If the record companies sold CDs for 69 cents each then the "pirates" wouldn't bother with music CDs. The record companies would never willingly reveal their cost of production - but you can safely assume that it's much less than a dollar. When they over-price the finished product at 20 dollars they create their own piracy problem.
Whilst I agree with most of your post, this is a specious argument - of course anyone with CD duplication facilities can knock out copies for cents but then they didn't actually have to produce the content on the CDs. Once you factor in the amount of time and money spent on rehearsal, recording, (audio) production, artwork, promotion, advertising, warehousing, distribution and THEN duplication the figure is going to be much higher.
Don't get me wrong, I think CDs are too pricey, but by the time it has got to the stores there is usually a markup of close to 100%. Big artists and big record companies do make a lot of money, but smaller bands and labels don't make much - there is a limited amount of punters who are going to be into your music, just dropping the price low won't result in vastly more sales.
I don't listen to "pirated" music. I want to pay a fair price for music. If I think it is too expensive then I'll wait until I see it cheaper. Stores like Fopp in the UK selling stuff for £5 revitalised my CD buying (shame they went bust by buying up too many stores much too quickly). I'm not going to to pay £30 for 2 CDs - I'll just not buy them and keep my money, but I'll regularly pay £30 for 5 or 6 CDs.
If smaller artists don't make enough money then they will go back to their day jobs and small labels will go out of business, manufactured bands will be the only "safe" things that the larger labels will back and we will all be the poorer for it. Consumers need to be grown up enough to realise that at the end of the day someone needs to make enough money out or recording this album that they can afford to to feed themselves, even make a better wage than flipping burgers or waiting tables. You aren't going to get the music for "free" (or even next to free) forever - no income, no artists.
I think the record industry needs to wise up and lower prices, but also anyone that thinks of themselves as a supporter of artists needs to put their money where their mouth is and pony up a reasonable price for stuff. If you do actually buy a fair amount of stuff (no-one could afford to buy *everything* they might like to) then I see no problem downloading music too (believe me, the artists and label people do it plenty), but it's the leeches who just download stuff and justify their leeching by railing against the nebulous music industry who are really doing the damage.
Pay a fair price for your music. Enjoy responsibly. Stay in school.
There's only really one person who might sit in the intersection of "been in space" and "reads slashdot", so unless Shuttleworth is reading this you just wasted a minute of your life that you will never get back
Maybe it's supercomputerspam (tag anyone?).
What with the IBM Saves $250M Running Linux On Mainframes story earlier it looks like IBM is pimping out their wares here on Slashdot.
They are probably behind the milfy bewbs too (is it too hard to put those two word into a lameness filter?)
Listen to me, you little puke. One of these days, I'm going to catch you, and I'm going to carve my name on your back with an ice pick!
At its highest price, the Blue Gene/L cost $1.3 million per rack
Pamela Anderson eat your heart out!
Well, Lamborghini did start out making tractors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini
Personally I wouldn't buy an Apple desktop, because I would built my own PC.
Buying a laptop would be a different matter however. If you buy a laptop you are pretty much buying an operating system too. I would much rather buy a UNIX based OS which, if some bit of hardware doesn't quite work right under Linux, which is ofter quite likely with a laptop, I can get to work on the supported OS and not have to run Windows to do it.
I would really like to be able to get some (self-compiled) OS X command line applications (like afconvert) to work under Linux or Darwin (which I could run under a virtual machine) by copying the CoreAudio, etc., frameworks across.
If anyone has managed to do this I would be extremely interested to hear about it