First.. in US airports, aside form any new legislation just up because of the Sept. 11 events, it is still legal to fly without presenting ID. The party line at check-in counters is a lie: they will happily tell you 'FAA regulations require us to ask for ID', but this is patently false. FAA regulations clearly state that it is permissible to fly without proper verifiable ID so long as they either a) make a thorough check of your baggage or b) ensure your baggage only goes onboard if you yourself are onboard. Remove it from the plane if you aren't onboard at takeoff. In fact, it may be illegal to refuse to let someone board a plane without ID. The reason the airlines don't tell you this? Because.. they want to enforce their STUPID non-transeferable tickets. Cancelled your plans? wanna give your expensive ticket to someone else? Too bad. That is evil.
As for the SIN. IT is illegal for anyone but the Government to REQUIRE you to present your SIN. The catch is.. you are not required to give it out to anyone but the government. You can always request an 'alternate' id number for credit checks and such.
Unversal ID cards aren't scary.. but I think the reason oracle & sun are involving themselves is because they are talking about a national ID 'system' as opposed to just cards. National ID cards are actually a good idea... I don't have a problem. I happily show my passport for ID all the time now anyway.
Let's face it folks; having a federally issued ID card, with your picture on it is NOT what bothers everyone. Do you think you government doesn't know you are a citizen? Do you have a passport? That's federally issued ID.
The REAL issue is where you have to present said ID card.
I don't have to present ID to ride the bus, to buy groceries, to drive on the highway (though I do have to have my driver's license). I don't have to present ID to cross from state to state. You don't technically have to show ID to board an airplane (but good luck doing so nowadays after the sept. 11 incidents).FAA regulations clearly allow you to travel without ID.
The issue is someone using that federal ID to track where you go, when, and how, and what you do, what you buy, etc. Isn't it?
Yes. I think the real issue is this: You can only add so much ram to the common motherboard before running out of slots, even though you could easily afford to buy more ram. So.. the next obvious solution is some sort of expansion card that you can add more ram to. Of course, said card won't run at the same bus speeds, because it would be PCI or some such... so it doesn't make sense to use it as main memory. A good kludge would be to use it as a 'disk' and then use it for an ultra-fast swap (though not as fast as main memory, it would be way faster than disk access).
Also.. as to why you need swap. Perhaps you don't; swap is just there because you CAN.. ie: if we ever run out of memory, we can start using the disk... makes good sense.
DVD phase 3 will never happen; that's not realistic. Sure they want it.. but nobody will buy a box that knowingly rats on them;)
As for region locking... that's still a software issue. Many DVD ROM drives already lock after a certain number of region changes.. and have to be returned to manufacturer. Of course, you just get new firmware, and a flash utility, and voila.. no more problem.
As for discs that check.. this is easily circumvented; you simply have a DVD player mod that, rather than make it automatically switch regions, lets you choose the region you want on powerup. Many already do this.
Do you have links to this DVD phase 3 stuff? Becuase all the stuff about locking to a certian player.. you are describing DivX...
I don't believe that, in the future, DRM will be absolute. We will always have formats that do not enforce rights; you will always be able to 'pirate' information, regardless of the form.
Now.. DRM will be an important part of media delivery in the future... but the thing that will make DRM work is not a better DRM solution... it's the content itself, and the price we pay for it.
You see, as long as a CD costs me $20, I'm going to try for mp3 instead. It's not because I can't afford to spend any money.. but given that I can get it for free, the cost of the associated extra hard-drives to store my growing music collection on, plus the internet fees to get it, are still far cheaper than what it costs me to buy a CD.
If, on the other hand, I could just pay Music Company X $20/month and be able to stream *any song* from their *entire library of recorded music* whenever I wanted.. I might just go for that. It needs to be cheap enough that it's not worth my time to pirate the music.
The same goes for video. Well.. actually.. it's almost true of video now. DivX is great.. but DVD's are surprisingly cheap, and hence, DVD piracy is not really an issue. Oh sure, people rip DVD's and download divx (or whatever) over the net... but I doubt it's currently affecting DVD sales to any measurable degree. DVD is a large increase in quality over the online versions... and it's very convenient.
Books as well. I won't pay for an E-book yet; because I can't lay in bed and read it comfortably. Real books still present some value that a digital copy just doesn't have yet. IN the future, however, if I could pick up my little book-like electronic reader, log-on to it with my finger, and pick which book I want to read, I would again be willing to happily pay a subscription fee to read books.
Now some thoughs regarding online music delivery.
I should be able to pay a monthly fee that entitles me to listen to X different tracks a month (spread out over different categories if they like.. this is just the basic idea). Now.. I should also be able to pay some small 'extra' fee and 'purchase' a title. This means I can listen to it anytime I want from anywhere I want, from now on, and it won't count towards my monthly subscription. Of course, it would be fair to have some hard limits relating to simple bandwidth use as well... as a separate issue from music titles.
Basically, in a nutshell, media delivery companies have to make paying them for the media more convenient than pirating it. They can either do that by exerting legal pressure (going to jail for pirating one song is not convenient).. but more realistically, they'll have to simply make more available the way we want it.
Light waves (or photons, if you like) can carry energy, yes.
'Heat' is energy.. yes.. the kinetic energy of particles. Or some such thing.. but 'heat' is not a thing.
Yes, okay, if you want to say 'e=mc2' matter and energy are interchangable.. but the point I was making is that energy is a sort of mathematical constant.. a property that we can observe in a system, it is not a 'thing'.
When we talk about matter converting to energy, say, during fission.. that 'energy' is in the form of kinetic energy.. motion of particles.. which we can use to heat up some heavy water, which in turn heats up some normal water to steam, which turns a turbine, which creates electricity.....
ALl these are just systems to move energy around... the 'energy' is conserved in the system overall.
I guess I just get dismayed at the misuse of the word 'energy'. Light is not energy. Electricity is not energy... but both can be used in the movement of energy.
e=mc2 does not mean, directly, 'we can convert light to matter and vice-versa'... it means that, in a closed system, the amount of matter can be decreased and the amount of energy in the system can increase.
That's a fairly narrow view. Yes, for read-only applications, flash is FINE. Hell.. Proms would be fine, and much cheaper. What do you think flash is? it's electronicly erasable read-only memory....
IF this is for a custom application.. fine. But if we're talking about a home PC.. they most certainly DO write to disk quite a bit. The discussion is about solid-state disks......
Flash is not a viable alternative for solid-state disks.
Disks write for both Swap, temporary files, etc. It hink you would be surprised how often your PC actually writes data to a disk.
Plus.. the number of erase/write cycles is also limited.. the flash wears out over time;.
Well... firstly, thought it's annoying.. often the compay that's providing internet service is affiliated with, or a branch of, the company providing you with cable TV.. but not hte same company or the same office. They rely on the cable-TV technicians to do all cabling-related issues.. and just use their internet guys to hook up the cable modem itself. So if a line goes out.. they expect you to call the cable TV people.
Also.. if you check your bill, they may or may not indicate the fact that $10 of your fee is actually a 'cable line fee'. ie: in Calgary, if you have cable TV, it's $49.95 for internet. IF you DONT have cable, it's $59.96 ($10/month for the cable line). Sleazy.. but kind of makes sense.
As for lost money, that's 100% your problem, not theirs. If downtime costs you money, you need to weigh that against the cost of a backup solution. That is, unless they made some kind of guarantee of service to you.
Competition *in the marketplace* makes things better *for the consumer*.
Torvalds is saying he doesn't build linux out of a drive to make it 'better than windows' or 'more liked than MacOS'. He writes it for the sake of writing it, to put the features he wants in it. He's not 'competing' with anyone, he's simply developing a kernel, because he wants to!
Doesn't learn? Why should he? I don't learn about how to perform CPR on the south-american pygmy rhinos.. because that's just not what I'm interested in. THe same goes for linus.. He's simply saying that he doesn't *care* about these things.. they aren't what drive him.
They also have relatively slow writes, much slower than a platter I believe...
And they are limited in the number of erase/write cycles. Flash wears out.
So what you need is a PCI card or something that you can add a LOT of dimms to.
You use it as a drive, and set it as your swap (and perhaps/tmp, etc) to gain a speedup.
A better solution would be to have motherboards that can take many, many dimms on the main bus... but.
"I never quite thought I'd see this in my life time, but RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives. "
256MB pc-100 dimms are like $20. That's $80/GB.
That's $6,400 for 80GB of memory.
An 80GB hard drive is about $250....
So what the heck are you talking about?
I don't understand what you are saying..
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
He's simply saying he doesn't take sides, he doesn't care what it's called. He calls his kernel linux, and what anyone else does with it or wants to call it is completely up to them.
THAT is what open-source is about... so many seem to miss that.
See point 5 as well, about competition. Linus says he's not competing with anyone.. just working on linux. He isn't trying to make linux a windows killer.. he's just trying to make it better.
Or.. to put it differnelty, mosix allows greater performance to a point, by adding machines... but doesn't provide redundancy. If the node a task started on crashes, the task is toast.
You can't instruct it, say, to move all tasks to another machine so you can perform maintenance.
Yes, I've looked at it and used it quite a bit.
Mosix is the kind of thing we are talking about.. EXCEPT...
.
Mosix only migrates the user context of a task to another machine. The process is still effecitvely tied to the node it started on; if that node crashes, bye-bye process.
What is meant in the article, though, is complete migration... having a process able to move to whichever hardware it wants to.
Many people are discussing how 'unix is more secure' or 'NT is used in the military, and it messed up that warship'. On and on...
Neither OS is at issue in cases like this. Overall system design is. NT can be JUST FINE for a particular task, if the system is properly engineered, including hardware, maintenance, etc.
Even if the military were to use linux (for all I know they do), they wouldn't be grabbing the latest kernel and patching everything all the time.. they would roll their own distribution (based on a current one or not), and use it, specifically, to build whatever system it is they want.
making something work FOR you, the way you need it to, is more than choosing the right OS. It's the entire approach you use to engineer and maintain a system. This is what many in the linux world find hard to understand.
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First.. in US airports, aside form any new legislation just up because of the Sept. 11 events, it is still legal to fly without presenting ID. The party line at check-in counters is a lie: they will happily tell you 'FAA regulations require us to ask for ID', but this is patently false. FAA regulations clearly state that it is permissible to fly without proper verifiable ID so long as they either a) make a thorough check of your baggage or b) ensure your baggage only goes onboard if you yourself are onboard. Remove it from the plane if you aren't onboard at takeoff. In fact, it may be illegal to refuse to let someone board a plane without ID. The reason the airlines don't tell you this? Because.. they want to enforce their STUPID non-transeferable tickets. Cancelled your plans? wanna give your expensive ticket to someone else? Too bad. That is evil.
As for the SIN. IT is illegal for anyone but the Government to REQUIRE you to present your SIN. The catch is.. you are not required to give it out to anyone but the government. You can always request an 'alternate' id number for credit checks and such.
Unversal ID cards aren't scary.. but I think the reason oracle & sun are involving themselves is because they are talking about a national ID 'system' as opposed to just cards. National ID cards are actually a good idea... I don't have a problem. I happily show my passport for ID all the time now anyway.
Let's face it folks; having a federally issued ID card, with your picture on it is NOT what bothers everyone. Do you think you government doesn't know you are a citizen? Do you have a passport? That's federally issued ID.
.FAA regulations clearly allow you to travel without ID.
The REAL issue is where you have to present said ID card.
I don't have to present ID to ride the bus, to buy groceries, to drive on the highway (though I do have to have my driver's license). I don't have to present ID to cross from state to state. You don't technically have to show ID to board an airplane (but good luck doing so nowadays after the sept. 11 incidents)
The issue is someone using that federal ID to track where you go, when, and how, and what you do, what you buy, etc. Isn't it?
Yes. I think the real issue is this: You can only add so much ram to the common motherboard before running out of slots, even though you could easily afford to buy more ram. So.. the next obvious solution is some sort of expansion card that you can add more ram to. Of course, said card won't run at the same bus speeds, because it would be PCI or some such... so it doesn't make sense to use it as main memory. A good kludge would be to use it as a 'disk' and then use it for an ultra-fast swap (though not as fast as main memory, it would be way faster than disk access).
Also.. as to why you need swap. Perhaps you don't; swap is just there because you CAN.. ie: if we ever run out of memory, we can start using the disk... makes good sense.
DVD phase 3 will never happen; that's not realistic. Sure they want it.. but nobody will buy a box that knowingly rats on them ;)
As for region locking... that's still a software issue. Many DVD ROM drives already lock after a certain number of region changes.. and have to be returned to manufacturer. Of course, you just get new firmware, and a flash utility, and voila.. no more problem.
As for discs that check.. this is easily circumvented; you simply have a DVD player mod that, rather than make it automatically switch regions, lets you choose the region you want on powerup. Many already do this.
Do you have links to this DVD phase 3 stuff? Becuase all the stuff about locking to a certian player.. you are describing DivX...
I don't believe that, in the future, DRM will be absolute. We will always have formats that do not enforce rights; you will always be able to 'pirate' information, regardless of the form.
Now.. DRM will be an important part of media delivery in the future... but the thing that will make DRM work is not a better DRM solution... it's the content itself, and the price we pay for it.
You see, as long as a CD costs me $20, I'm going to try for mp3 instead. It's not because I can't afford to spend any money.. but given that I can get it for free, the cost of the associated extra hard-drives to store my growing music collection on, plus the internet fees to get it, are still far cheaper than what it costs me to buy a CD.
If, on the other hand, I could just pay Music Company X $20/month and be able to stream *any song* from their *entire library of recorded music* whenever I wanted.. I might just go for that. It needs to be cheap enough that it's not worth my time to pirate the music.
The same goes for video. Well.. actually.. it's almost true of video now. DivX is great.. but DVD's are surprisingly cheap, and hence, DVD piracy is not really an issue. Oh sure, people rip DVD's and download divx (or whatever) over the net... but I doubt it's currently affecting DVD sales to any measurable degree. DVD is a large increase in quality over the online versions... and it's very convenient.
Books as well. I won't pay for an E-book yet; because I can't lay in bed and read it comfortably. Real books still present some value that a digital copy just doesn't have yet. IN the future, however, if I could pick up my little book-like electronic reader, log-on to it with my finger, and pick which book I want to read, I would again be willing to happily pay a subscription fee to read books.
Now some thoughs regarding online music delivery.
I should be able to pay a monthly fee that entitles me to listen to X different tracks a month (spread out over different categories if they like.. this is just the basic idea). Now.. I should also be able to pay some small 'extra' fee and 'purchase' a title. This means I can listen to it anytime I want from anywhere I want, from now on, and it won't count towards my monthly subscription. Of course, it would be fair to have some hard limits relating to simple bandwidth use as well... as a separate issue from music titles.
Basically, in a nutshell, media delivery companies have to make paying them for the media more convenient than pirating it. They can either do that by exerting legal pressure (going to jail for pirating one song is not convenient).. but more realistically, they'll have to simply make more available the way we want it.
Again.. there is no such thing as pure 'energy'.
Light waves (or photons, if you like) can carry energy, yes.
'Heat' is energy.. yes.. the kinetic energy of particles. Or some such thing.. but 'heat' is not a thing.
Yes, okay, if you want to say 'e=mc2' matter and energy are interchangable.. but the point I was making is that energy is a sort of mathematical constant.. a property that we can observe in a system, it is not a 'thing'.
When we talk about matter converting to energy, say, during fission.. that 'energy' is in the form of kinetic energy.. motion of particles.. which we can use to heat up some heavy water, which in turn heats up some normal water to steam, which turns a turbine, which creates electricity.....
ALl these are just systems to move energy around... the 'energy' is conserved in the system overall.
I guess I just get dismayed at the misuse of the word 'energy'. Light is not energy. Electricity is not energy... but both can be used in the movement of energy.
e=mc2 does not mean, directly, 'we can convert light to matter and vice-versa'... it means that, in a closed system, the amount of matter can be decreased and the amount of energy in the system can increase.
That's a fairly narrow view. Yes, for read-only applications, flash is FINE. Hell.. Proms would be fine, and much cheaper. What do you think flash is? it's electronicly erasable read-only memory....
IF this is for a custom application.. fine. But if we're talking about a home PC.. they most certainly DO write to disk quite a bit. The discussion is about solid-state disks......
Flash is not a viable alternative for solid-state disks.
Disks write for both Swap, temporary files, etc. It hink you would be surprised how often your PC actually writes data to a disk.
Plus.. the number of erase/write cycles is also limited.. the flash wears out over time;.
Well... firstly, thought it's annoying.. often the compay that's providing internet service is affiliated with, or a branch of, the company providing you with cable TV.. but not hte same company or the same office. They rely on the cable-TV technicians to do all cabling-related issues.. and just use their internet guys to hook up the cable modem itself. So if a line goes out.. they expect you to call the cable TV people.
Also.. if you check your bill, they may or may not indicate the fact that $10 of your fee is actually a 'cable line fee'. ie: in Calgary, if you have cable TV, it's $49.95 for internet. IF you DONT have cable, it's $59.96 ($10/month for the cable line). Sleazy.. but kind of makes sense.
As for lost money, that's 100% your problem, not theirs. If downtime costs you money, you need to weigh that against the cost of a backup solution. That is, unless they made some kind of guarantee of service to you.
"Per unit of currency is a multi-national way of saying 'Per Dollar' or 'Per Pound' or 'Per Peso'.
It means how many bytes you can store for $1.
IT does not mean 'usable chunks'. It means exactl what it says. Per Unit of Currency.
Gates is horribly biased. Torvalds is not.
Competition *in the marketplace* makes things better *for the consumer*.
Torvalds is saying he doesn't build linux out of a drive to make it 'better than windows' or 'more liked than MacOS'. He writes it for the sake of writing it, to put the features he wants in it. He's not 'competing' with anyone, he's simply developing a kernel, because he wants to!
Doesn't learn? Why should he? I don't learn about how to perform CPR on the south-american pygmy rhinos.. because that's just not what I'm interested in. THe same goes for linus.. He's simply saying that he doesn't *care* about these things.. they aren't what drive him.
Yeah.. so I'm off.
But $50/MB? IT wasn't $50/MB until... 93 or 94 methinks....
They also have relatively slow writes, much slower than a platter I believe...
And they are limited in the number of erase/write cycles. Flash wears out.
Ummm... although these are neat....
They are not 'offering' them. They don't even have them for sale yet.
It's just a simple device.. probably costs too much... you can only add up to 4GB...
I can see some practical uses of it.. but they are basically using marketspeak to sell junk.
is basically how caching works. It's already done.. it's not something new. Linux does it. Every OS does it.. even windows...
The only difference is things aren't cached until they are loaded the first time.
If your computer had 80GB of memory, you would invariably end up with most of your HD (at least, what you were using) cached.
Aside from being expensive...
Flash is slow to write to.... and is limited in the number of writes. Flash wears out.
Back then, wasn't ram like $50/KB??
I recall 1MB dimms in 1992 or so costing $150
So what you need is a PCI card or something that you can add a LOT of dimms to. /tmp, etc) to gain a speedup.
You use it as a drive, and set it as your swap (and perhaps
A better solution would be to have motherboards that can take many, many dimms on the main bus... but.
It's called 'disk caching'. Linux does it. Windows even does it. Everyone does it these days.
And maintaing power to all that RAM indefinitely is....... surprise, what a UPS is for.
Per unit of currency means simply Number of bytes per (dollar or peso or escudo or lira or rupee or colone or peseta or pound)
What do you mean talking about MB for one and GB for another.. that makes no sense.. and would be meaningless.
Cliffy's just wrong.
"I never quite thought I'd see this in my life time, but RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives. "
256MB pc-100 dimms are like $20. That's $80/GB.
That's $6,400 for 80GB of memory.
An 80GB hard drive is about $250....
So what the heck are you talking about?
He's simply saying he doesn't take sides, he doesn't care what it's called. He calls his kernel linux, and what anyone else does with it or wants to call it is completely up to them.
THAT is what open-source is about... so many seem to miss that.
See point 5 as well, about competition. Linus says he's not competing with anyone.. just working on linux. He isn't trying to make linux a windows killer.. he's just trying to make it better.
They let me do bad things to good people.
Or.. to put it differnelty, mosix allows greater performance to a point, by adding machines... but doesn't provide redundancy. If the node a task started on crashes, the task is toast.
You can't instruct it, say, to move all tasks to another machine so you can perform maintenance.
Yes, I've looked at it and used it quite a bit.
Mosix is the kind of thing we are talking about.. EXCEPT...
.
Mosix only migrates the user context of a task to another machine. The process is still effecitvely tied to the node it started on; if that node crashes, bye-bye process.
What is meant in the article, though, is complete migration... having a process able to move to whichever hardware it wants to.
Many people are discussing how 'unix is more secure' or 'NT is used in the military, and it messed up that warship'. On and on...
Neither OS is at issue in cases like this. Overall system design is. NT can be JUST FINE for a particular task, if the system is properly engineered, including hardware, maintenance, etc.
Even if the military were to use linux (for all I know they do), they wouldn't be grabbing the latest kernel and patching everything all the time.. they would roll their own distribution (based on a current one or not), and use it, specifically, to build whatever system it is they want.
making something work FOR you, the way you need it to, is more than choosing the right OS. It's the entire approach you use to engineer and maintain a system. This is what many in the linux world find hard to understand.