I think the hardware manufacturers would simply be naturally interested in using the logo once they realize people look for it, especially if the certification is inexpensive, since it will build some trust within the linux community and give that manufacturer an edge over the non-certified herd. Marketing-wise, it's a big plus.
To do like Microsoft with their Logo program, we'd need some sort of central authority that would regulate who can and can't use the "Tux Certified" logo, and act accordingly when there are cheaters.
The problem is : how can we go after the "illegal" Tux logo users ? Who's going to pay the legal fees for this ?
For Microsoft this is easy to enforce, if they see someone using the M$ Logo inappropriately, they can sue their pants off for "Trademark Abuse" or something of the sort (IANAL). Who would own the trademark for Linux/TuxLogo ? Linus maybe ?
Well.. production is peanuts.. so are royalties (40$ every 2-3 months for a few friends who held the dance/club top 5 for months a few years ago - yay, that's alot!). Distribution is relatively inexpensive; a day-long truck transit costs about 200 $USD to the shipper, now consider how many cd's you can fit in an 18 wheeler. Packaging is the big expense : cases, inserts and labeling are alot of hassle.
Now I can't provide you with a notarized financial statement, but if you really expect my to join such proof with a mere slashdot comment, then you're definitely on crack!
Intel, like Microsoft, are bound by the rules of megacorporatism. Just like our friends at the RIAA, who set the prices for CD's about 15x their cost, Intel has to stick to certain pricing guidelines in order to maintain market stability. On a small scale, dropping prices to increase volume is generally a winner, but when it comes to these huge markets, the rules are reversed. The good old rule of Offer vs Demand still prevails.
What an eye twitching coincidence : mine's dreaming of entering the medical field as well. I wouldn't throw any calculus at her though. She has enough trouble just figuring out the square of a binomial. Anyways, we're each put through our own experiences which may differ wildly. I've been with both social geeks and technical geeks, and at least in my life they followed very identifiable behavioral patterns. And as far as that kitchen metaphor goes, it's not bad actually, but the trend is heading away from that "housewife" stereotype. Maybe I'm just living in some alien colony here, but I have yet to meet someone (of compatible age) who can cook and clean and whatnot. Ask my gf to make anything more than pasta and you'll be tossing it in the garbage on your way to the restaurant. Thank goodness for Stir-fried Random.
I'm no political genius.. but isn't France a little too small to go against the covert government-funded load of FUD named Echelon ? To me that's kinda like a bunch of script kiddies trying to overthrow the RIAA with squirt guns. The balance of power just isn't in their favor at all.
I can just see this happening now : People will purchase magazines on this video-paper, then the monthly issues will be wired to them through the net. Next thing you'll know, some script kiddie's gonna be uploading video virii to everyone. Open up that swimsuit issue of SI, and you'll be greeted with nudes of Barbara Walters instead. BRRRRRR!
Sure, MAME does it, but since MAME is just a single application, it can do whatever it wants to its display. It's a piece of cake to swap the X and Y during each graphics op.. but when you're trying to turn the entire desktop sideways, you can't quite do it as trivially. It would probably require rotating each pixmap prior to calling any blit functions, so basically the graphics abstraction layer would be doing a helluva lot of work in software. You'd pretty much give up on most accelerator functions, except hardware blits. It's feasible, but kludgy.
I know this sounds stupid, but wouldn't good old "Oh my god this website sucks" X10.com have something that can do that ? Else they would certainly be more than willing to design something custom-made for a price. Their devices are easy to control through a whole bunch of scripting languages (and of course real development languages too). At the least you'll end up with a bunch of "free" vcr remotes =)
Ham Radio sure isn't dead, it's just not talked about in the mainstream anymore, obviously because it's aging, but more importantly because of the immeasurable flood of communications and entertainment news. The FCC still issues technician's licenses and there are still companies that manufacture the hardware. You just don't hear about it anymore.. instead, electronics and communications publications have shifted their spotlight onto the digital/cellular domain.
If the euros are screaming at ICANN because it's American, what the hell were they doing back in the day of the big evil NetSol ? I'm no domain-registration genius, but it seems to me like ICANN is trying to be the "big brother" NetSol was, albeit much more clumsily. Lawsuits here and there, all to no end. Talks of any form of internet tax have been greeted with flaming rage. The net doesn't need over-ambitious regulation and direction, we just need some boundaries for safety and peace of mind. When will the big guys get the message ??
My S.O. could testify for this : when we geek guys unleash our techspeak, we just make any non-geek feel stupid and ignorant, both men and women. Now don't start tossing eggs in my direction, I don't sit on these stereotypes but I will use them simply to expose my theory.
Now the problem might stem from the common observation that men are typically better with pure logic and can usually figure the stuff out with a few well placed questions ("So you're saying this CPU thing is like the carburator ?"). Anyways, in contrast, women seem to have (in general) much more difficulty in relating abstract concepts to more physical/familiar counterparts; they're more confortable sticking with purely abstract things, not crossing over with metaphores and real-life examples.
Let's take our favored example : Math. I'd have to say that 90% of all women I've known totally suck at math, yes even my geek mother. It's a very exhausting experience watching my gf do her math homework, mainly because she asks me more questions than she has to answer. How hard can it be to understand that a trapezoid is really just a square + 2 triangles ? I must have spent the whole afternoon shoving some spatial sense into her head.
Anyways, PC's are prime applications of this abstract-to-concrete train of thought. We have small rectangular icons we call "objects". They're not the objects like coke cans, or long-range throwable desk phones.. but if you can look beyond the physical aspect, the computer representation of an object is right on par with the real-life object. This is the key analogy that most female specimens seem to have trouble with. I'm not saying they're too stupid to figure it out, because the ones who persevere DO end up grokking the goods, but it's a relatively long process for women, at least from my personal observations. IMHO, women who have difficulty with this type of symmetric thinking are the ones who shy away from technical jobs because they have more trouble deriving solutions when faced with unexpected hurdles.
Another thing I've noticed is not necessarily the hostility of non-geeks vs geeks, but more importantly the reverse situation. Intellectual, technical types such as myself look upon the rest of the crowd as somewhat ignorant and pointless. Spending a day without thinking, without creating.. that's a wasted day to me.
My gf throws a small fit whenever I spend more than 10 seconds at the keyboard when she's around, which usually results in her being totally ignored for a few hours to pressure her. It's a natural reaction to her hostility toward my career, and I'm sure it gives her a bad impression of the type of people I work with. We're all highly focused tech-gods, each trying to prove him/herself right and the other person wrong. This holds for "geek girls" as well. We have a spoonful of them here, and they're a bunch of sore-tempered perfectionists. Now quite frankly, I'd rather have a dumb but sociable assistant, than these long-haired psychos. Anyone who knows a true geek girl will agree with me that they're independent, stubborn, and aggressive. Just like us guys. The problem is that this behavior may be expected in men, but most managers just don't know how to handle it in women. The workplace is such a gender-centric environment. I'm one of two tech guys transplanted into a human resources department, and wouldn't you know, we're the only guys on the whole floor. Managers hire along certain gender patterns, and people apply for work along similar patterns as well. All these things are slowly changing with the implementation of a gender equity process, but for the time being, every single department is dominated either by men or women. And gender favoritism set aside, there will always be more guys in tinkering work and more women in paperwork. That's just what we each do best.
No matter what you add to the packets to check for integrity and authenticity, the first law of cracking still stands : whatever you come up with to protect your data, someone will crack it in less time than it took you to design it. You can add whatever checksums, hashes you like, it'll be dead easy for anything but a script kiddie to reverse it. If the server is able to validate the checksums, then it's just as easy for a cracked client to use the same code.
Why does Oracle need to resort to such useless pathetic means to tarnish Microsoft when it's simply telling the whole world how sneaky and mischievous they are ?
Oracle, despite having an insane and fist-attracting CEO, have a solid product that's been known worldwide for years as being the top database system hands down. Their reputation is everything, why do they go and mess it up with these spy stories ?
They should quit spending cash on that crap and apply the funds to mental therapy instead.
These big guys should refocus on what made them big : the product, not the paranoia. Stoolies and jealous whiners are ok in grade school, not in multibillion dollar businesses.
Quite simply, if this is going to be just a file server, I'd suggest going for a single cpu. IMHO, SMP is good for big badassed multithreaded apps like 3d modelling/rendering. Network servers are also heavily multithreaded, but they employ many short-lived processes whose overhead shadows the efficiency savings of SMP.. too much context switching and extra hassle. Single is simpler, and simple is fast. But what's more important here is the actual data throughput. Nic's are very important, as well as the I/O bus speed. Wide/LVD Scsi hard drive are ideal, but ATA66/100 is much cheaper and "fast enough". Now I don't know Samba's performance details, but you probably don't need a Xeon 800 to run this unless you're expecting >200 simultaneous requests. Even at 100mbps, a P2-450 with a decent amount of ram should do fine. One thing you should consider (if the guys in charge aren't Intel whores) is the AMD Athlon Thunderbird if you want to get away with it for cheap. Compared to P3's, I find they run just as fine and fast, and price wise it's an obvious winner, which would leave you with more cash left to spend on the truly critical elements : NIC's and hard drives.
Quite simply, some people can tell the difference in sound, and some can't. Maybe their ears aren't as sensitive, maybe they just don't listen to music enough to recognize the acoustic crispness (or lack thereof), or maybe they just never heard of Polk Audio speakers. The big problem here, is that most people (I'd hope) who own decent home stereo systems can tell the difference between FM stereo and CD sound. Add this Dell MP3 player to their system, and they will certainly notice the slightly degraded sound quality, or maybe the wishy-washy high frequencies of anything run through Xing Encoder. On cheap 10$ pc speakers these details might go unnoticed, but on a 300 watt home stereo, the difference will be rather obvious to a moderately trained listener.
Audio enthusiasts are notorious for being extremely perfectionist. We're the guys who frown upon car mp3 players that don't go above 192kbps. We're the guys who want to punch the marketroid from Diamond who said "If you recompress at 96kbps you can fit more tunes on your Rio". We're the guys who measure the distance between each wall and speaker to make sure everything is perfectly balanced. We're the guys who'd rather enjoy silence, than use cheap Radio Scrap headphones.
No self respecting audiophile would dare patch in a consumer cheap-grade MP3 player onto his 4500$ Harman-Kardon system. It's just absurd.
Dos can do 32-bit through the use of what's commonly known as a "Dos Extender". Remember Doom and Quake and all those great games from the Dos era ? Ever noticed that "DOS4GW Protected Mode" startup message ?
That's the Dos Extender being loaded. Basically it's a (relatively) small loader/overlay that switches into protected mode and handles the boring chore of thunking and relaying interrupts and all that delightfully mind numbing crap.
DOS4GW was generally associated with Watcom C++, while DJGPP commonly uses GO32 as its extender although they are easily interchangeable with a few code changes (slightly different API's). Whichever extended you use, they do more or less the same things : thunking interrupts, managing flat ram (vs 16-bit segmented ram), and giving nice detailed register dumps when they crash.
While the concept of pseudo-intelligent software trying to figure out what's depicted in an image is very interesting, it simply has nothing to gain from neural networks.
Surely it is quite possible to figure out if a picture depicts genitalia in most cases (excluding the cases where even human judgement is defeated), but I think it would be best applied by scanning small round areas iteratively like a spotlight, and trying to follow "interesting" trails until they can be identified. Once the image has been mapped and subdivided into physical elements, a second phase of the recognition could verify if indeed this is a human we're looking at, by analyzing the overall size of the "object" and checking the proportions/alignment of the individual areas. This is just typical visual recognition, the hard part comes when you consider the infinite angles and positions that the subject can assume.
A quick example: suppose the subject is facing away from the viewpoint on all fours (yeah I know, typical).. how will the software figure out if there is depiction of "bush" or just dark underwear ?
Image quality would also be of concern.. a blurry image would probably confuse the recognition engine, and overlaid text/graphics would be a serious problem. Not to mention the extreme cpu load for the entire process, repeated N times for all the images on a page.
It would probably be cheaper and faster to hire a few hundred gumbies and have them check all images manually (no pun intended).
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I think the hardware manufacturers would simply be naturally interested in using the logo once they realize people look for it, especially if the certification is inexpensive, since it will build some trust within the linux community and give that manufacturer an edge over the non-certified herd. Marketing-wise, it's a big plus.
To do like Microsoft with their Logo program, we'd need some sort of central authority that would regulate who can and can't use the "Tux Certified" logo, and act accordingly when there are cheaters.
The problem is : how can we go after the "illegal" Tux logo users ? Who's going to pay the legal fees for this ?
For Microsoft this is easy to enforce, if they see someone using the M$ Logo inappropriately, they can sue their pants off for "Trademark Abuse" or something of the sort (IANAL). Who would own the trademark for Linux/TuxLogo ? Linus maybe ?
Well.. production is peanuts.. so are royalties (40$ every 2-3 months for a few friends who held the dance/club top 5 for months a few years ago - yay, that's alot!). Distribution is relatively inexpensive; a day-long truck transit costs about 200 $USD to the shipper, now consider how many cd's you can fit in an 18 wheeler. Packaging is the big expense : cases, inserts and labeling are alot of hassle.
Now I can't provide you with a notarized financial statement, but if you really expect my to join such proof with a mere slashdot comment, then you're definitely on crack!
Intel, like Microsoft, are bound by the rules of megacorporatism. Just like our friends at the RIAA, who set the prices for CD's about 15x their cost, Intel has to stick to certain pricing guidelines in order to maintain market stability. On a small scale, dropping prices to increase volume is generally a winner, but when it comes to these huge markets, the rules are reversed. The good old rule of Offer vs Demand still prevails.
What an eye twitching coincidence : mine's dreaming of entering the medical field as well. I wouldn't throw any calculus at her though. She has enough trouble just figuring out the square of a binomial. Anyways, we're each put through our own experiences which may differ wildly. I've been with both social geeks and technical geeks, and at least in my life they followed very identifiable behavioral patterns. And as far as that kitchen metaphor goes, it's not bad actually, but the trend is heading away from that "housewife" stereotype. Maybe I'm just living in some alien colony here, but I have yet to meet someone (of compatible age) who can cook and clean and whatnot. Ask my gf to make anything more than pasta and you'll be tossing it in the garbage on your way to the restaurant. Thank goodness for Stir-fried Random.
I'm no political genius.. but isn't France a little too small to go against the covert government-funded load of FUD named Echelon ? To me that's kinda like a bunch of script kiddies trying to overthrow the RIAA with squirt guns. The balance of power just isn't in their favor at all.
I wonder if they could nuke the growth-inhibiting gene in breasts as an alternative to mammary implants.
Then they can genetically engineer stronger ribs to hold the damn heavy things in place.
The scary thought is that there's probably some dumb american somewhere who could actually make money with these retarded ideas.
I can just see this happening now : People will purchase magazines on this video-paper, then the monthly issues will be wired to them through the net. Next thing you'll know, some script kiddie's gonna be uploading video virii to everyone. Open up that swimsuit issue of SI, and you'll be greeted with nudes of Barbara Walters instead. BRRRRRR!
Sure, MAME does it, but since MAME is just a single application, it can do whatever it wants to its display. It's a piece of cake to swap the X and Y during each graphics op.. but when you're trying to turn the entire desktop sideways, you can't quite do it as trivially. It would probably require rotating each pixmap prior to calling any blit functions, so basically the graphics abstraction layer would be doing a helluva lot of work in software. You'd pretty much give up on most accelerator functions, except hardware blits. It's feasible, but kludgy.
I know this sounds stupid, but wouldn't good old "Oh my god this website sucks" X10.com have something that can do that ? Else they would certainly be more than willing to design something custom-made for a price. Their devices are easy to control through a whole bunch of scripting languages (and of course real development languages too). At the least you'll end up with a bunch of "free" vcr remotes =)
Ham Radio sure isn't dead, it's just not talked about in the mainstream anymore, obviously because it's aging, but more importantly because of the immeasurable flood of communications and entertainment news. The FCC still issues technician's licenses and there are still companies that manufacture the hardware. You just don't hear about it anymore.. instead, electronics and communications publications have shifted their spotlight onto the digital/cellular domain.
If the euros are screaming at ICANN because it's American, what the hell were they doing back in the day of the big evil NetSol ? I'm no domain-registration genius, but it seems to me like ICANN is trying to be the "big brother" NetSol was, albeit much more clumsily. Lawsuits here and there, all to no end. Talks of any form of internet tax have been greeted with flaming rage. The net doesn't need over-ambitious regulation and direction, we just need some boundaries for safety and peace of mind. When will the big guys get the message ??
My S.O. could testify for this : when we geek guys unleash our techspeak, we just make any non-geek feel stupid and ignorant, both men and women. Now don't start tossing eggs in my direction, I don't sit on these stereotypes but I will use them simply to expose my theory.
Now the problem might stem from the common observation that men are typically better with pure logic and can usually figure the stuff out with a few well placed questions ("So you're saying this CPU thing is like the carburator ?"). Anyways, in contrast, women seem to have (in general) much more difficulty in relating abstract concepts to more physical/familiar counterparts; they're more confortable sticking with purely abstract things, not crossing over with metaphores and real-life examples.
Let's take our favored example : Math. I'd have to say that 90% of all women I've known totally suck at math, yes even my geek mother. It's a very exhausting experience watching my gf do her math homework, mainly because she asks me more questions than she has to answer. How hard can it be to understand that a trapezoid is really just a square + 2 triangles ? I must have spent the whole afternoon shoving some spatial sense into her head.
Anyways, PC's are prime applications of this abstract-to-concrete train of thought. We have small rectangular icons we call "objects". They're not the objects like coke cans, or long-range throwable desk phones.. but if you can look beyond the physical aspect, the computer representation of an object is right on par with the real-life object. This is the key analogy that most female specimens seem to have trouble with. I'm not saying they're too stupid to figure it out, because the ones who persevere DO end up grokking the goods, but it's a relatively long process for women, at least from my personal observations. IMHO, women who have difficulty with this type of symmetric thinking are the ones who shy away from technical jobs because they have more trouble deriving solutions when faced with unexpected hurdles.
Another thing I've noticed is not necessarily the hostility of non-geeks vs geeks, but more importantly the reverse situation. Intellectual, technical types such as myself look upon the rest of the crowd as somewhat ignorant and pointless. Spending a day without thinking, without creating.. that's a wasted day to me.
My gf throws a small fit whenever I spend more than 10 seconds at the keyboard when she's around, which usually results in her being totally ignored for a few hours to pressure her. It's a natural reaction to her hostility toward my career, and I'm sure it gives her a bad impression of the type of people I work with. We're all highly focused tech-gods, each trying to prove him/herself right and the other person wrong. This holds for "geek girls" as well. We have a spoonful of them here, and they're a bunch of sore-tempered perfectionists. Now quite frankly, I'd rather have a dumb but sociable assistant, than these long-haired psychos. Anyone who knows a true geek girl will agree with me that they're independent, stubborn, and aggressive. Just like us guys. The problem is that this behavior may be expected in men, but most managers just don't know how to handle it in women. The workplace is such a gender-centric environment. I'm one of two tech guys transplanted into a human resources department, and wouldn't you know, we're the only guys on the whole floor. Managers hire along certain gender patterns, and people apply for work along similar patterns as well. All these things are slowly changing with the implementation of a gender equity process, but for the time being, every single department is dominated either by men or women. And gender favoritism set aside, there will always be more guys in tinkering work and more women in paperwork. That's just what we each do best.
Funny how the guy mentioned he's using a cable modem. Last I heard, cable modems hooked up to the cable lines.
In this light, I think you'd make a great Sympatico/Rogers call center clerk.. a supervisor even.
No matter what you add to the packets to check for integrity and authenticity, the first law of cracking still stands : whatever you come up with to protect your data, someone will crack it in less time than it took you to design it. You can add whatever checksums, hashes you like, it'll be dead easy for anything but a script kiddie to reverse it. If the server is able to validate the checksums, then it's just as easy for a cracked client to use the same code.
Why does Oracle need to resort to such useless pathetic means to tarnish Microsoft when it's simply telling the whole world how sneaky and mischievous they are ?
Oracle, despite having an insane and fist-attracting CEO, have a solid product that's been known worldwide for years as being the top database system hands down. Their reputation is everything, why do they go and mess it up with these spy stories ?
They should quit spending cash on that crap and apply the funds to mental therapy instead.
These big guys should refocus on what made them big : the product, not the paranoia. Stoolies and jealous whiners are ok in grade school, not in multibillion dollar businesses.
Quite simply, if this is going to be just a file server, I'd suggest going for a single cpu. IMHO, SMP is good for big badassed multithreaded apps like 3d modelling/rendering. Network servers are also heavily multithreaded, but they employ many short-lived processes whose overhead shadows the efficiency savings of SMP.. too much context switching and extra hassle. Single is simpler, and simple is fast. But what's more important here is the actual data throughput. Nic's are very important, as well as the I/O bus speed. Wide/LVD Scsi hard drive are ideal, but ATA66/100 is much cheaper and "fast enough". Now I don't know Samba's performance details, but you probably don't need a Xeon 800 to run this unless you're expecting >200 simultaneous requests. Even at 100mbps, a P2-450 with a decent amount of ram should do fine. One thing you should consider (if the guys in charge aren't Intel whores) is the AMD Athlon Thunderbird if you want to get away with it for cheap. Compared to P3's, I find they run just as fine and fast, and price wise it's an obvious winner, which would leave you with more cash left to spend on the truly critical elements : NIC's and hard drives.
Quite simply, some people can tell the difference in sound, and some can't. Maybe their ears aren't as sensitive, maybe they just don't listen to music enough to recognize the acoustic crispness (or lack thereof), or maybe they just never heard of Polk Audio speakers. The big problem here, is that most people (I'd hope) who own decent home stereo systems can tell the difference between FM stereo and CD sound. Add this Dell MP3 player to their system, and they will certainly notice the slightly degraded sound quality, or maybe the wishy-washy high frequencies of anything run through Xing Encoder. On cheap 10$ pc speakers these details might go unnoticed, but on a 300 watt home stereo, the difference will be rather obvious to a moderately trained listener.
Audio enthusiasts are notorious for being extremely perfectionist. We're the guys who frown upon car mp3 players that don't go above 192kbps. We're the guys who want to punch the marketroid from Diamond who said "If you recompress at 96kbps you can fit more tunes on your Rio". We're the guys who measure the distance between each wall and speaker to make sure everything is perfectly balanced. We're the guys who'd rather enjoy silence, than use cheap Radio Scrap headphones.
No self respecting audiophile would dare patch in a consumer cheap-grade MP3 player onto his 4500$ Harman-Kardon system. It's just absurd.
Dos can do 32-bit through the use of what's commonly known as a "Dos Extender". Remember Doom and Quake and all those great games from the Dos era ? Ever noticed that "DOS4GW Protected Mode" startup message ?
That's the Dos Extender being loaded. Basically it's a (relatively) small loader/overlay that switches into protected mode and handles the boring chore of thunking and relaying interrupts and all that delightfully mind numbing crap.
DOS4GW was generally associated with Watcom C++, while DJGPP commonly uses GO32 as its extender although they are easily interchangeable with a few code changes (slightly different API's). Whichever extended you use, they do more or less the same things : thunking interrupts, managing flat ram (vs 16-bit segmented ram), and giving nice detailed register dumps when they crash.
While the concept of pseudo-intelligent software trying to figure out what's depicted in an image is very interesting, it simply has nothing to gain from neural networks.
Surely it is quite possible to figure out if a picture depicts genitalia in most cases (excluding the cases where even human judgement is defeated), but I think it would be best applied by scanning small round areas iteratively like a spotlight, and trying to follow "interesting" trails until they can be identified. Once the image has been mapped and subdivided into physical elements, a second phase of the recognition could verify if indeed this is a human we're looking at, by analyzing the overall size of the "object" and checking the proportions/alignment of the individual areas. This is just typical visual recognition, the hard part comes when you consider the infinite angles and positions that the subject can assume.
A quick example: suppose the subject is facing away from the viewpoint on all fours (yeah I know, typical).. how will the software figure out if there is depiction of "bush" or just dark underwear ?
Image quality would also be of concern.. a blurry image would probably confuse the recognition engine, and overlaid text/graphics would be a serious problem. Not to mention the extreme cpu load for the entire process, repeated N times for all the images on a page.
It would probably be cheaper and faster to hire a few hundred gumbies and have them check all images manually (no pun intended).
-Billco