of course, under certain circumstances, this could be useful in the same way finger prints are. Read my previous post to see that I am against this kind of thing in principal, but if it _has_ to be in there, then at least I can prove that I didn't copy things that I am accused of or print threatening documents, or even I can prove that I am the copyright holder becasue my printer can be examined and it can be linked to the original document and then dated by tracing ink ages and wear and tear to the printed incurred since the print.
If copy protection exists in copiers, surely simply removing the appropriate circuit would be reletively easy? from my experience most CP occurs as a result of being sat on and so is added at the last minute (e.g. DVD, etc.) as such it is a "bolton" to the original standard and can be separated from the system.
Don't forget good old black and white lazers. The drum on every such printer (be it colour or black and white) produces markes on the paper every time paper spins through it and slightly impacts on it. Since every drum has fairly unique features, so called "drum prints" have been used as evidence in courts for various trials. You might think that this is fairly useless because this will only prove that a particular suspect did it - it won't help you find out who the suspect is. However, the electronic watermarks are only so useful. I'm all against such technology (I have never bought or knowingly used a PIII - except I think cdrom.com now runs on one - I have had my CPU examined to verify that there is no PSN in it, etc.), but IDs are only useful if you know who owns them. Now if they do keep registration lists - then that's another story - they probably keep lists on most printers sice I guess most copiers are rented anyway. If I were to counterfait notes, you could perhpas trace the copier, but you would then have to prove that I actually made the copy (the fact that I may have made the copy at my place of work and that the notes have my fingerprints on would probably not be enough evidence anyway - IANAL). The short answer is that such tracing technology has existed as long as the technology itself:
I can trace a particular typewriter by impact marks, who used a rubber stamp, who used a dot matrix, ink ject or lazer printer, etc. I'm not going to loose any sleep over this since true paranoia freeks would say that the only way to escape big brother is to head for the hills and give up all modern technology (have they worked out a way for tracing who used a toilet seat by impact marks yet?)
No, I disagree. DOSEMU _emulates_ an Operating System. It does not emulate a ix86 machine. One can only run a limited range of dos based programs under DOESMU (I'm told that you might be able to run windows 3.1 in real mode). The point is VMWare actually emulates a MACHINE, providing you with the ability to run the original OS. It's all very well emulating an OS. But OS's such as windows are even more closed source than the standards that modern PCs are supposed to comply with. Why not emulate the machine? that way any new OS will run on it (with possible minor alterations for new technology over time). You don't need to rewrite the entire emulator when win2k comes out for example. Also, all of the broken stuff in windows automagically works without any help. All of a sudden not having a DVD player or support from your favourite hw vendor could become less of a problem for some people. I don't run windows because I don't believe in the methodology and "ideals" behind the beast that is Microsoft - that's not to say others don't use windows. If only freemware were more advanced or VMWare cheaper, Linux could be pre-installed on more machines and those wanting to run their favourite windows game could run it fullscreen inside windows easily without any effort (this is a while away). BTW, emulating a CPU is just plain crazy! The CPU is executing millions and millions of instructions per second, the only times one really emulates CPUs is when designing new ones and one doesn't care how fast they run. Please don't point me to WINE. I know WINE, but it is another OS emulator and not a machine emulator. It cannot ever hope to keep up with windows. Although there are larger and larger gaps between windows releases, there are still new windows releases (at least in the short term) and it takes time for the WINE guys to get cought up (excellent work guys in WINE though - I really find what you do useful, particulalry in my studies when I hjave to ensure that my code will run under the windows IDE that the marker is using - this week it was one of the PROLOG systems for windows to test code written under the standard pl implementation that comes with Linux). In short me need freemware. We kinda needed VMware, but it commercial and we want to have a publically available "free" VM for Linux that doesn't cost more than the OS running on it.
I first noticed this project whilst my continuing evaluation of VMWare was taking place back in April. The site was pretty empty back then, but they had a great idea - produce an open sourced, free (as in FSF definition) vitual machine running under Linux. Basically one can have another "machine" running on top of whatever they have already. The system works because the "guest" operating systems are originally written for the processor upon which the virtual machine is running. The virtual machine runs as a conduite or "bridge" between the physical processor, the OS and the guest environment, passing processor instructions on to the main processor. Several problems can occur with this.
1). You can only run an operating system which was originally developed for your particular processor - in the case of the x86 family of chips, this just happens to include a wide range of OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, windows, dos, Minix, etc.) so we are quite fortunate that we can have the "facilities" provided by certain alternative operating systems. What we can't do is suddenly run MacOS on our PII. Transmeta may or may be not working on software to allow chips in the embedded market out of this situation when it comes to embedded OS's
2). You have to create an actual "mock" machine for the OS to run inside of. In the case of VMWare, they use a Phoenix BIOS inside the software to provide a basic functionality for the system. The BIOS provided is often very basic in its construction and provides only limited features.
3. You have to provide third party vendors access to your underlying hardware through device drivers. You must be able to run a device driver from your graphics, soundcard, etc. vendor on the VM without any glitches. All the obscure "trade secret" NDA oriented code must just work, including any obscure ways that it accesses the cards inside the system, any broken implementations that it takes advantage of, etc. The PCI standard for one is known to be poorly compliant in implementation with its own standards - all such wierdness must be replicated entirely.
VMWare have produced some reasonable software. True it's commercial in nature, but it does provide some degree of OS independence. Ufortunately, VMWare will not yet support some of the really cool stuff, such as DVD access for playing DVDs. It is also quite expensive (more expensive even than windows).
Freemware is going to be really cool. Unfortunately, and now getting back to the original point of my post - Freemware do not have access to some of the key elements required to build a virtual machine. They need to provide the physical layer that conceptually sits atop the uderlying kernel/hardware and provides kernel/device access. They need to provide this access through an emulated BIOS. VMWare have the Phoenix BIOS whcih they have bought in for use in VMWare - Freemware have to start from scratch. Furthermore, companies such as Microsoft (and their "supporters") are bound to be unhappy with the ease of which an OS could be monitored/reverse-engineered with such technology. As such, you can bet they make it as hard as possible for such machine emulation to be successful. Some companies aren't going to like the idea that people are running their stuff on emulated machines - their support droids won't know where to start when diagnosing some more complex problems.
Freemware have to emulate pretty much everything inside a standard PC. Does anyone actually have a "standard" PC? NO. More precisely Freemware need to emulate all of the little quirks inside modern computers - the "slightly broken" standards, the increasingly wide variety or hardware and the drivers for the emulated hardware - linked to the physical hardware via lower level kernel calls and raw device access.
All the while, they have to fight the age old battle against the large corporations who don't want people to know how their stuff actually works. I don't actually know anyone who can describe in detail exactly how the entirity of a modern PC works. Freemware have a hell of a task ahead of them.
Remember, companies like VMWare have bought in the core technology from others and wired it together using their own code. Freemware have zero co-operation (probably the opposite) from large corporations and they have to do everything from scratch.
An interesting question is "does windows 2000 run properly on VMware?" Have OS vendors tried to brake their OS's intentionally to prevent VMs from working with their stuff. Surely companies writing device drivers aren't going to like guys running their device drivers on top of VMs running on OS's like Linux where one can see "under the hood" and know what is going on with the hardware very easily. Imagine how easily one could reverse engineer one's favourite windows device drivers once device drivers are supported under VMs.
You're a complete tw*t aren't you? I wasn't alive in the sixties, this does not mean that I don't appreciate what it was about. There are many religious people out there who will tell you that the Christian/whatever faith has been around for thousands or years and yet it is still followed religiously. Nobody alive remembers the founding of many modern day faiths that date back thousands of years and yet if you were to walk into a place of spiritual gathering (church, mosque, temple, etc.) then you would be in for heavy criticism if you attempted to tell them that they had no idea what they were doing simply because they didn't witness the events first hand. Another point: Do you vote? you don't sit in parliament watching everything that goes on do you? no. In fact you will accept a certain amount of imformation from third parties when deciding who/what to support without even witnessing events first hand. With the kind of resources availalbe in this modern day and age it is not necessary to attend every event or witness every "revolution" to understand what it was about. Once again, you are a tw*t and now I must stop wasting time replying to ACs.
I'm off to patent "A method of human interaction resulting in intense pleasure and possible offspring". Anyone caught having sex without the $20 per time license fee will be sued by this administration.
Subject: Your Absolute Stupidity on/. Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 00:38:35 +0000 From: Jon Masters To: lucas@caralis.com
Here are some corrections (next time - RTFM!!! - Why not _do_ some research on the issue before posting crap?
>Re: Why is indust stopping me frm seeing DVDs I PAI (probably should have been: Re: Why is the industry stopping me from seeing the DVD API)
> This is in reply to the first 5 people who've posted...
> The movie industry isn't forcing you to buy or use windows. You can purchase > a DVD player for your TV and bypass the whole computer thing. It is a > convienence that player-back software exists. It's made it to the Mac and > Wintel so far, and will probably not come to Linux anytime soon.
Er OK, so what you are saying is that I'm not being forced to buy windows? Firstly, I wouldn't say forced (I buirned all my copies of windows years ago - and I _do_ mean burned). Secondly, the industry has closed sourced all of the DVD API and underlying algorithms to such an extent that, until now, it has not been possible to implement a player on an alternative platform. I would call that being pressured into using a windows or mac player (how many people keep windows around simply to watch DVDs - point).
You also moan on about the fact that nobody is being forced into using a DVD software player. This is entirely true, however, the sheer fact that DVD technology is implemented as it is, coupled with the inclusion of DVD drives with _every_ new computer, does kinda lend itself towards that idea (you say: "duh, oh yeah, maybe I should have thought of that first - I'm a Microsoft/Movie industry FUD writer just doing my job").
> For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
Yes, and just because a particular platform has a wide installation base, it _must_ be the best and _only_ thing to use, right? I think you'll find that there are _enough_ Linux users to make a port a very reasonable idea. A PORT - not a REWRITE. The software exists, porting aint hard (I think Xing should now be charged with doing the Linux port). MTV did a Linux port of their MPEG stuff, why can't someone do a Linux port of DVD software? (answer follows - and it aint NDAs).
> For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there > have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use > it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
No there isn't any way of find out how many people use Linux on a daily basis, and I'm sure _YOU_ can point me to a site that has _EXACT_ numbers of windows users who use windows daily? - NO, YOU CAN'T CAN YOU? That's right folkes, we can't tell exactly how many Linux/Windows users there are. OK, so there are probably more windows users at the moment due to the distribution of windows in an OEM fashion (expect that to slowly change over time). The point is, there are plenty of users to warrent a port of DVD technology to Linux based systems. Linux probably has as many regular users as the Mac. Why don't you look into such things as linuxcounter, together with other similar sites.
> For three, all the mainstream press talks about Linux's use in the server > arena. Servers don't need to play DVD movies. So, why would the movie > industry want to create a player for a server?
Yeah, that's right, you can say "server". Can you say "idiot"? I see, Linux is only used on big servers, ah well we know where the sharpest tool in the box is now don't we...
> Also for three, there players available for Solaris, *BSD, Openserver, > Unixware, Netware, BeOS, Irix, AIX, or HP-UX? I'm guessing not. And for them > to create a *nix port solely to serve this market would be a huge waste of > resources given the potential returns.
Hello? You seem to be suffering from the MS problem of having two "3s" - you didn't number them 3.0 (cockup) and 3.1/3.11 though... According to Sun, Solaris DVD support is expected shortly, I would have though other proprietry based UN*X solutions will have one soon. BeOS has always been able to play DVDs (even the freely available screenshots show a DVD player). Eat your words mate. Er huge waste of resources? Yes that's right folkes, a single coder _PORTING_ existing code does take a _LOT_ of resources doesn't it...
> (Still stuck on 3...) Rather than just running ahead and writing that > program, was this brought up in a more political sense, such as > letter-writing, email, phone calls, etc? I doubt it was, to any extent, > maybe one or two here or there. Maybe some programmers could have done the > movie-watching community a favor by signing a NDA, and created binaries for > the said platforms, with the industries okay. Was that tried?
How's Tibet this time of year - you been high in the mountains for long? I'm assuming that you have no idea of what is going on. YES, letter-writing, email, phone calls, faxes, brainwashing, treatment, etc... - they were _ALL_ tried. Yes there were "petitions" to those companies. What makes you lack of knowledge in the area more accute is the fact that you just shot yourself in the foot. One cannot "just sign an NDA" - one has to pay at least $20,000 for the pleasure. So although many have tried to do the community a favour, they can't. I mean honestly, you really haven't even bothered to read the previous/. posts on the DVD situation have you?
> Four, you can do whatever you want with the disc itself. Burn it. Use it as > a frisbee. microwave it. It's the IP on the disk (the movie) that you need > to show some restraint about...:)
Restraint? Are you absolutely insane? NOBODY SAID THAT THE "SITUATION" STARTED BECAUSE ANYONE WANTED TO _COPY_ A DVD. It started because the DVD community would like to watch a DVD under Linux. Oh, but anything involving third party open source software which aint from the manufacturer must be used to copy DVD mustn't it... keep taking those pills and you might get better someday. Read _before_ you post.
> Now for five. DVD playback probably will take longer to make > it to Linux than it would have before. Why? Because > of this. More and more, I notice around here (not singling > anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality > of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same > thign forfree" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
You have now crossed the line and it is _THAT_ statement which caused me to be so harsh on you in particular. The slashdot community _DON'T_ have the aforementioned mentality you fsck... (no I won't say that because that would insult stupid people, oh, wait, that's you). The Linux community as a whole isn't interested (this includes me in particular) in copying or not paying the same as everyone else to watch a DVD. What we want is equality - we pay the same 20quid for the DVD, we only want to be able to watch it. You really haven't read anything on this issue have you?
> Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries > okay on releasing spec's (and liablility for implementing > a playback mechanism) for DVD. They can easily view those > two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated > movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're > the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, > too."
One more time - DeCSS _WASN'T_ written to copy DVDs you absolutely insane person. It was written to allow people to watch DVDs under Linux. It has a couple of side-effects (which wouldn't exist if the DVD industry supported Linux more - by making people sign NDAs, but not making them pay over $20,000 to develop a DVD player - most windows players are free or come with the DVD drive itself). You don't use Linux do you? How much are you being paid to write this crap? I expect a complete retraction to appear very soon.
> You really have to watch yourself when stepping around the > giants of any industry... you may not realize that you've > stepped on their toes until it's much too late.
Yes you do, you have to be careful not to accidently tread on them and squash them.
> All done for now.
Oh I'm so glad that you are done for now, go off an write some FUD for something else you twit.
Jon.
-- Jonathan C. Masters "Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it". -- Matthew 16, 17-18
People, people! The _REASON_ why the DVD CSS protection was cracked in the first place was _NOT_ to illegally copy DVDs. Rather it was to counter the lack of support (and provide support in the process) for DVD playback on systems which the DVD forum don't believe are worth the time of day. I'd love to say that this is all Microsoft's fault for its (OEM, brainwashing, etc.) wide distribution of a single platform which is the only real platform to have the support of the manufacturers. I think everyone can learn a lesson here: if you could buy a DVD enabled MTV/whatever, then those people who cracked CSS wouldn't have cracked it - they weren't out to break the law, they only used their expertise to get other system support for DVD (they weren't doing it for the hell of it). Hope you all see what I mean here. Jon.
bomb kill die grenade explosion masacre murder destroy police NSA FBI CIA Government USA US Congress kill everyone Bill Clinton Clinton Administration Everyone must die Guns random violence protest abuse victim carnage suicide hostile takeover storm troops militia military law 1st Ammendment US Constitution Human rights Iraq Iran Libia Supply rockets lauchers war dead die kill echelon sniper Evil Linux Penguins Embassy Embasador Gun Ship Helicopter Assult Attack Destoy Eliminate Destruction Plastic Explosives Dynamite Sentex Uprising Tear Gas Bullets Knives Bill Gates Tony Blair... And many more:-)
Hi, I'm also 17 and living in the UK. Despite the fact that I have been in the press/TV/etc... for several IT related things (including being the youngest computing student in the UK when I was 13) I have great difficulty getting in to IT events also. The most recent example would be "Linux Expo" organised by IT Events - a company with the unenlightened philosophy that anyone under the age of 18 (or students!) should not be allowed to attend their events. This is a stupid policy. Can't they realise that we represent the future of the IT industry and that we therefore deserve a rightful place at such preceedings. They need to MOVE with the times...
What you all seem to fail to realise is that M$ isn't "stupid" (depends on your definition - but just humour me for a second). Well, OK, I hate them as much as the most extream Linux advocate could ever possibly hate them, but the fact that they've lasted so long so far means that they (by whatever underhand, etc. tactics) are fairly successful. You'd have to be plain silly to think that this is the "first" study of this kind conducted my M$. I'll bet they have whole teams of people who work on parts of the Linux kernel. If I wanted to develop a commercially successful OS/Applications and there were open sourced applications of a similar nature - I'd be very interested in "borrowing" ideas too. Don't forget that they just bought a major UN*X company so we might be seeing signs of a shift in the M$ position? I just hope they ditch Winblows and concentrate on what they're good at - writing talking paperclips which are completely useless and hated by all, to be embeded into _reliable_ wordprocessors like vi:) Wanna mail me? wincrap2000@hotmail.com
OK so we have several guys A, B C, etc... Guy A posts a comment of some value which the Moderator (Guy B) thinks should be read be the entire world. They moderate the comment and make it higher. Guys C,D,E, etc.. basically just have a nasty grudge on B or else they just plain simply hate guy B. They moderate B so that he looses his moderating abilities, and then moderate amougst their friends to raise their "status" and permanently keep their moderation abilities. The answer is SIMPLY allow EITHER Meta Moderation OR Moderation BUT don't allow every moderator to be a Meta Moderator or the above situation will occur. There is absolutely nothing to be gained if a Meta Moderator without Moderation abilities tries something, or vice versa. Why? because system abusing [Meta] Moderators will be complained about in time to fix it. ANOTHER IDEA: Meta Moderators moderate Moderators and Moderators moderate Meta Moderators. If someone can't be both a moderator and a Meta Moderator, this would work nicely. This is a "wheels within wheels" type situation which (if you've heard GIS 4 recently) Rob should understand very well:) You might not read this becasue a moderation conspiracy will make this comment -10000000 because those guys don't like me:)
I'm not saying it was M$ in particular, but I did phone the UK and US hq's yesturday, and spoke to several "important" people to ask them "why is it that the 9th most popular book that _your_ company pays for is the Microsoft File: The secret case against Bill Gates?"!!! They were to say the least "dumbfounded" to hear that people such as myself know about their Anti M$ fealings! I expect a couple of similar cases occured yesturday.... Jon.
Sorry Rob, but the others are right - it only seems to affect queries via their web pages. I think that the 2 things which should concern us are: 1). We have to *pay* to download their ads. True it's only a small amount of extra data, but 2). who is (excuse the pun) to decide what material to allow in the form of adverts? A porn company (perhaps even the "open porn" company - I just listened to gis episode 4 for the 50th time:) might "justify" that they have every right to advertise via WHOIS. That then makes it illegal for many people (minors, those in China, etc...) to view the WHOIS database! not only that,but Ican forsee similar things to the RBL being imposed, then the sites which link to the whois database get censored for linking to it, etc... I hope this does happen because I really want NSI to go bankrupt and for the government to turn it (the WHOIS database) over to one of the non-profit groups that runs root servers (they know how to do things properly). NSI has no right to do this. This would be like the telephone company playing you an advert every time you ring 192 (directory assistance) - or whatever number it is that you guys dial in the US. Nobody's going to bother to read this so it don't matter much anyway... Jon.
My experience with MP3 started about 6 months ago. I used bladeenc at first and tried lame as well. What I really hated about bladeenc was the speed. Sure, the audio quality is fairly good and I would freely buy that guy many drinks for his hard work, but the time it takes on my PII-400 is just silly. I mean, it takes about 6 mins to encode that latest "number one" hit into an MP3. I tried LAME, which isn't as good in my opinion (I class myself as having a fairly good ear - I went to sony labs about 5-6 years ago when MiniDisc was first being developed and marketed and I could easily tell the difference between each of the various formats they had - I think that included MP3, but definitely the MPEG 1 stuff at the time). So LAME wasn't as good and took about the smae amount of time to encode. I looked around and found Xing. I purchased their encoder and found it to be fairly good. It sounds much better than bladeenc et al. and it can encode at nearly 4x which is excellent. Their are just a few things that ***YOU*** should know about our friends at xing. 1). They are about to be bought out by Real, so don't expect any product updates soon. 2). The enocder can encode at several times real time on my machine, but even using fifos, or whatever you care to try, there is *no* way to get the xing encoder to read from a mic input (e.g. via esd's PCM output from esdrec) and output in a mannor that would enable me to do live webcasts. This was very irritating as I couldn't understand why their program didn't like fifo's. 3). When I contacted the Xing support department, I got no reply for over 4 weeks and then all I got was a *RUDE* reply from someone who used offensive language to tell me where I could stick my..... etc... - when I threatened to *sue* them or take them to trading standards I received further unpleasant replies and I am left fealing that they have a very good encoder, but they have *incompetent* staff who have no idea of what they are doing, or of any knowledge of customer relations. IF YOU WANT A GOOD ENCODER, USE THE XING ENCODER - BUT BE WARNED, THEY NOT ONLY BITE, BUT SEND YOU OFFENSIVE OR OBSCENE REPLIES WHEN YOU MAIL THEM. I know that no-one will ever read this because it's way too far down the replies list for anyone to bother to read. Jon.
When's the linux kernel going to support it and the almighty question: can I have a beowolf clustering playstation - that would be cool:) yeah I know I asked it, but someone had to.
Have you been into a Tiny computers showroom recently? You'll find that they have a selection of cutaway/clear caseswhich they use to demonstrate the technology inside their machines to customers - maybe people should ask them about it.
Hi, Me and the guys at Oxlug meet the first Sundayof each month and have a drink before and after the meeting. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see if I can arrange (find some company willing to back the event) a similar event in the UK, get any ideas on this. I recon we'd have to wait now until after new year if we really wanna hire somewhere big and do it properly. Jon.
Here's some output: [mastersj@periscope mastersj]$ ping www.windows2000test.com ping: unknown host www.windows2000test.com [mastersj@periscope mastersj]$ ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.windows2000test.com/ The following error was encountered: ERROR 205 -- DNS name lookup failure. Please contact your system administrator. This means that: Host lookup www.windows2000test.com not available Web-Caching powered by Network Appliance. Generated by NetCache/3.4D3@www-cache.pol.co.uk:8080 Wed, 21 Jul 1999 13:51:06 GMT Broken retrieval invalidation Generated by NetCache/3.4D3@www-cache.freeserve.net:8080
Slashdot Mirror
of course, under certain circumstances, this could be useful in the same way finger prints are. Read my previous post to see that I am against this kind of thing in principal, but if it _has_ to be in there, then at least I can prove that I didn't copy things that I am accused of or print threatening documents, or even I can prove that I am the copyright holder becasue my printer can be examined and it can be linked to the original document and then dated by tracing ink ages and wear and tear to the printed incurred since the print.
If copy protection exists in copiers, surely simply removing the appropriate circuit would be reletively easy? from my experience most CP occurs as a result of being sat on and so is added at the last minute (e.g. DVD, etc.) as such it is a "bolton" to the original standard and can be separated from the system.
Jon.
Don't forget good old black and white lazers. The drum on every such printer (be it colour or black and white) produces markes on the paper every time paper spins through it and slightly impacts on it. Since every drum has fairly unique features, so called "drum prints" have been used as evidence in courts for various trials. You might think that this is fairly useless because this will only prove that a particular suspect did it - it won't help you find out who the suspect is. However, the electronic watermarks are only so useful. I'm all against such technology (I have never bought or knowingly used a PIII - except I think cdrom.com now runs on one - I have had my CPU examined to verify that there is no PSN in it, etc.), but IDs are only useful if you know who owns them. Now if they do keep registration lists - then that's another story - they probably keep lists on most printers sice I guess most copiers are rented anyway. If I were to counterfait notes, you could perhpas trace the copier, but you would then have to prove that I actually made the copy (the fact that I may have made the copy at my place of work and that the notes have my fingerprints on would probably not be enough evidence anyway - IANAL). The short answer is that such tracing technology has existed as long as the technology itself:
I can trace a particular typewriter by impact marks, who used a rubber stamp, who used a dot matrix, ink ject or lazer printer, etc. I'm not going to loose any sleep over this since true paranoia freeks would say that the only way to escape big brother is to head for the hills and give up all modern technology (have they worked out a way for tracing who used a toilet seat by impact marks yet?)
No, I disagree. DOSEMU _emulates_ an Operating System. It does not emulate a ix86 machine. One can only run a limited range of dos based programs under DOESMU (I'm told that you might be able to run windows 3.1 in real mode). The point is VMWare actually emulates a MACHINE, providing you with the ability to run the original OS. It's all very well emulating an OS. But OS's such as windows are even more closed source than the standards that modern PCs are supposed to comply with. Why not emulate the machine? that way any new OS will run on it (with possible minor alterations for new technology over time). You don't need to rewrite the entire emulator when win2k comes out for example. Also, all of the broken stuff in windows automagically works without any help. All of a sudden not having a DVD player or support from your favourite hw vendor could become less of a problem for some people. I don't run windows because I don't believe in the methodology and "ideals" behind the beast that is Microsoft - that's not to say others don't use windows. If only freemware were more advanced or VMWare cheaper, Linux could be pre-installed on more machines and those wanting to run their favourite windows game could run it fullscreen inside windows easily without any effort (this is a while away). BTW, emulating a CPU is just plain crazy! The CPU is executing millions and millions of instructions per second, the only times one really emulates CPUs is when designing new ones and one doesn't care how fast they run. Please don't point me to WINE. I know WINE, but it is another OS emulator and not a machine emulator. It cannot ever hope to keep up with windows. Although there are larger and larger gaps between windows releases, there are still new windows releases (at least in the short term) and it takes time for the WINE guys to get cought up (excellent work guys in WINE though - I really find what you do useful, particulalry in my studies when I hjave to ensure that my code will run under the windows IDE that the marker is using - this week it was one of the PROLOG systems for windows to test code written under the standard pl implementation that comes with Linux). In short me need freemware. We kinda needed VMware, but it commercial and we want to have a publically available "free" VM for Linux that doesn't cost more than the OS running on it.
I first noticed this project whilst my continuing evaluation of VMWare was taking place back in April. The site was pretty empty back then, but they had a great idea - produce an open sourced, free (as in FSF definition) vitual machine running under Linux. Basically one can have another "machine" running on top of whatever they have already. The system works because the "guest" operating systems are originally written for the processor upon which the virtual machine is running. The virtual machine runs as a conduite or "bridge" between the physical processor, the OS and the guest environment, passing processor instructions on to the main processor. Several problems can occur with this.
1). You can only run an operating system which was originally developed for your particular processor - in the case of the x86 family of chips, this just happens to include a wide range of OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, windows, dos, Minix, etc.) so we are quite fortunate that we can have the "facilities" provided by certain alternative operating systems. What we can't do is suddenly run MacOS on our PII. Transmeta may or may be not working on software to allow chips in the embedded market out of this situation when it comes to embedded OS's
2). You have to create an actual "mock" machine for the OS to run inside of. In the case of VMWare, they use a Phoenix BIOS inside the software to provide a basic functionality for the system. The BIOS provided is often very basic in its construction and provides only limited features.
3. You have to provide third party vendors access to your underlying hardware through device drivers. You must be able to run a device driver from your graphics, soundcard, etc. vendor on the VM without any glitches. All the obscure "trade secret" NDA oriented code must just work, including any obscure ways that it accesses the cards inside the system, any broken implementations that it takes advantage of, etc. The PCI standard for one is known to be poorly compliant in implementation with its own standards - all such wierdness must be replicated entirely.
VMWare have produced some reasonable software. True it's commercial in nature, but it does provide some degree of OS independence. Ufortunately, VMWare will not yet support some of the really cool stuff, such as DVD access for playing DVDs. It is also quite expensive (more expensive even than windows).
Freemware is going to be really cool. Unfortunately, and now getting back to the original point of my post - Freemware do not have access to some of the key elements required to build a virtual machine. They need to provide the physical layer that conceptually sits atop the uderlying kernel/hardware and provides kernel/device access. They need to provide this access through an emulated BIOS. VMWare have the Phoenix BIOS whcih they have bought in for use in VMWare - Freemware have to start from scratch. Furthermore, companies such as Microsoft (and their "supporters") are bound to be unhappy with the ease of which an OS could be monitored/reverse-engineered with such technology. As such, you can bet they make it as hard as possible for such machine emulation to be successful. Some companies aren't going to like the idea that people are running their stuff on emulated machines - their support droids won't know where to start when diagnosing some more complex problems.
Freemware have to emulate pretty much everything inside a standard PC. Does anyone actually have a "standard" PC? NO. More precisely Freemware need to emulate all of the little quirks inside modern computers - the "slightly broken" standards, the increasingly wide variety or hardware and the drivers for the emulated hardware - linked to the physical hardware via lower level kernel calls and raw device access.
All the while, they have to fight the age old battle against the large corporations who don't want people to know how their stuff actually works. I don't actually know anyone who can describe in detail exactly how the entirity of a modern PC works. Freemware have a hell of a task ahead of them.
Remember, companies like VMWare have bought in the core technology from others and wired it together using their own code. Freemware have zero co-operation (probably the opposite) from large corporations and they have to do everything from scratch.
An interesting question is "does windows 2000 run properly on VMware?" Have OS vendors tried to brake their OS's intentionally to prevent VMs from working with their stuff. Surely companies writing device drivers aren't going to like guys running their device drivers on top of VMs running on OS's like Linux where one can see "under the hood" and know what is going on with the hardware very easily. Imagine how easily one could reverse engineer one's favourite windows device drivers once device drivers are supported under VMs.
JUst my $0.02
M$ trying to get around legal restrictions again! oh well, give them credit for trying (over and over again).
You're a complete tw*t aren't you? I wasn't alive in the sixties, this does not mean that I don't appreciate what it was about. There are many religious people out there who will tell you that the Christian/whatever faith has been around for thousands or years and yet it is still followed religiously. Nobody alive remembers the founding of many modern day faiths that date back thousands of years and yet if you were to walk into a place of spiritual gathering (church, mosque, temple, etc.) then you would be in for heavy criticism if you attempted to tell them that they had no idea what they were doing simply because they didn't witness the events first hand. Another point: Do you vote? you don't sit in parliament watching everything that goes on do you? no. In fact you will accept a certain amount of imformation from third parties when deciding who/what to support without even witnessing events first hand. With the kind of resources availalbe in this modern day and age it is not necessary to attend every event or witness every "revolution" to understand what it was about. Once again, you are a tw*t and now I must stop wasting time replying to ACs.
when they attack the postman delivering the first post.
I'm off to patent "A method of human interaction resulting in intense pleasure and possible offspring". Anyone caught having sex without the $20 per time license fee will be sued by this administration.
Subject: /.
/. posts
:)
Your Absolute Stupidity on
Date:
Wed, 10 Nov 1999 00:38:35 +0000
From:
Jon Masters
To:
lucas@caralis.com
Here are some corrections (next time - RTFM!!! - Why not _do_ some
research on the issue before posting crap?
>Re: Why is indust stopping me frm seeing DVDs I PAI
(probably should have been:
Re: Why is the industry stopping me from seeing the DVD API)
> This is in reply to the first 5 people who've posted...
> The movie industry isn't forcing you to buy or use windows. You can purchase
> a DVD player for your TV and bypass the whole computer thing. It is a
> convienence that player-back software exists. It's made it to the Mac and
> Wintel so far, and will probably not come to Linux anytime soon.
Er OK, so what you are saying is that I'm not being forced to buy
windows? Firstly, I wouldn't say forced (I buirned all my copies of
windows years ago - and I _do_ mean burned). Secondly, the industry has
closed sourced all of the DVD API and underlying algorithms to such an
extent that, until now, it has not been possible to implement a player
on an alternative platform. I would call that being pressured into using
a windows or mac player (how many people keep windows around simply to
watch DVDs - point).
You also moan on about the fact that nobody is being forced into using a
DVD software player. This is entirely true, however, the sheer fact that
DVD technology is implemented as it is, coupled with the inclusion of
DVD drives with _every_ new computer, does kinda lend itself towards
that idea (you say: "duh, oh yeah, maybe I should have thought of that
first - I'm a Microsoft/Movie industry FUD writer just doing my job").
> For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
Yes, and just because a particular platform has a wide installation
base, it _must_ be the best and _only_ thing to use, right? I think
you'll find that there are _enough_ Linux users to make a port a very
reasonable idea. A PORT - not a REWRITE. The software exists, porting
aint hard (I think Xing should now be charged with doing the Linux
port). MTV did a Linux port of their MPEG stuff, why can't someone do a
Linux port of DVD software? (answer follows - and it aint NDAs).
> For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there
> have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use
> it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
No there isn't any way of find out how many people use Linux on a daily
basis, and I'm sure _YOU_ can point me to a site that has _EXACT_
numbers of windows users who use windows daily? - NO, YOU CAN'T CAN YOU?
That's right folkes, we can't tell exactly how many Linux/Windows users
there are. OK, so there are probably more windows users at the moment
due to the distribution of windows in an OEM fashion (expect that to
slowly change over time). The point is, there are plenty of users to
warrent a port of DVD technology to Linux based systems. Linux probably
has as many regular users as the Mac. Why don't you look into such
things as linuxcounter, together with other similar sites.
> For three, all the mainstream press talks about Linux's use in the server
> arena. Servers don't need to play DVD movies. So, why would the movie
> industry want to create a player for a server?
Yeah, that's right, you can say "server". Can you say "idiot"? I see,
Linux is only used on big servers, ah well we know where the sharpest
tool in the box is now don't we...
> Also for three, there players available for Solaris, *BSD, Openserver,
> Unixware, Netware, BeOS, Irix, AIX, or HP-UX? I'm guessing not. And for them
> to create a *nix port solely to serve this market would be a huge waste of
> resources given the potential returns.
Hello? You seem to be suffering from the MS problem of having two "3s" -
you didn't number them 3.0 (cockup) and 3.1/3.11 though... According to
Sun, Solaris DVD support is expected shortly, I would have though other
proprietry based UN*X solutions will have one soon. BeOS has always been
able to play DVDs (even the freely available screenshots show a DVD
player). Eat your words mate. Er huge waste of resources? Yes that's
right folkes, a single coder _PORTING_ existing code does take a _LOT_
of resources doesn't it...
> (Still stuck on 3...) Rather than just running ahead and writing that
> program, was this brought up in a more political sense, such as
> letter-writing, email, phone calls, etc? I doubt it was, to any extent,
> maybe one or two here or there. Maybe some programmers could have done the
> movie-watching community a favor by signing a NDA, and created binaries for
> the said platforms, with the industries okay. Was that tried?
How's Tibet this time of year - you been high in the mountains for long?
I'm assuming that you have no idea of what is going on. YES,
letter-writing, email, phone calls, faxes, brainwashing, treatment,
etc... - they were _ALL_ tried. Yes there were "petitions" to those
companies. What makes you lack of knowledge in the area more accute is
the fact that you just shot yourself in the foot. One cannot "just sign
an NDA" - one has to pay at least $20,000 for the pleasure. So although
many have tried to do the community a favour, they can't. I mean
honestly, you really haven't even bothered to read the previous
on the DVD situation have you?
> Four, you can do whatever you want with the disc itself. Burn it. Use it as
> a frisbee. microwave it. It's the IP on the disk (the movie) that you need
> to show some restraint about...
Restraint? Are you absolutely insane? NOBODY SAID THAT THE "SITUATION"
STARTED BECAUSE ANYONE WANTED TO _COPY_ A DVD. It started because the
DVD community would like to watch a DVD under Linux. Oh, but anything
involving third party open source software which aint from the
manufacturer must be used to copy DVD mustn't it... keep taking those
pills and you might get better someday. Read _before_ you post.
> Now for five. DVD playback probably will take longer to make
> it to Linux than it would have before. Why? Because
> of this. More and more, I notice around here (not singling
> anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality
> of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same
> thign forfree" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
You have now crossed the line and it is _THAT_ statement which caused me
to be so harsh on you in particular. The slashdot community _DON'T_ have
the aforementioned mentality you fsck... (no I won't say that because
that would insult stupid people, oh, wait, that's you). The Linux
community as a whole isn't interested (this includes me in particular)
in copying or not paying the same as everyone else to watch a DVD. What
we want is equality - we pay the same 20quid for the DVD, we only want
to be able to watch it. You really haven't read anything on this issue
have you?
> Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries
> okay on releasing spec's (and liablility for implementing
> a playback mechanism) for DVD. They can easily view those
> two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated
> movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're
> the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends,
> too."
One more time - DeCSS _WASN'T_ written to copy DVDs you absolutely
insane person. It was written to allow people to watch DVDs under Linux.
It has a couple of side-effects (which wouldn't exist if the DVD
industry supported Linux more - by making people sign NDAs, but not
making them pay over $20,000 to develop a DVD player - most windows
players are free or come with the DVD drive itself). You don't use Linux
do you? How much are you being paid to write this crap? I expect a
complete retraction to appear very soon.
> You really have to watch yourself when stepping around the
> giants of any industry... you may not realize that you've
> stepped on their toes until it's much too late.
Yes you do, you have to be careful not to accidently tread on them and
squash them.
> All done for now.
Oh I'm so glad that you are done for now, go off an write some FUD for
something else you twit.
Jon.
--
Jonathan C. Masters
"Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it". -- Matthew 16, 17-18
People, people! The _REASON_ why the DVD CSS protection was cracked in the first place was _NOT_ to illegally copy DVDs. Rather it was to counter the lack of support (and provide support in the process) for DVD playback on systems which the DVD forum don't believe are worth the time of day. I'd love to say that this is all Microsoft's fault for its (OEM, brainwashing, etc.) wide distribution of a single platform which is the only real platform to have the support of the manufacturers. I think everyone can learn a lesson here: if you could buy a DVD enabled MTV/whatever, then those people who cracked CSS wouldn't have cracked it - they weren't out to break the law, they only used their expertise to get other system support for DVD (they weren't doing it for the hell of it). Hope you all see what I mean here. Jon.
bomb kill die grenade explosion masacre murder destroy police NSA FBI CIA Government USA US Congress kill everyone Bill Clinton Clinton Administration Everyone must die Guns random violence protest abuse victim carnage suicide hostile takeover storm troops militia military law 1st Ammendment US Constitution Human rights Iraq Iran Libia Supply rockets lauchers war dead die kill echelon sniper Evil Linux Penguins Embassy Embasador Gun Ship Helicopter Assult Attack Destoy Eliminate Destruction Plastic Explosives Dynamite Sentex Uprising Tear Gas Bullets Knives Bill Gates Tony Blair... And many more :-)
Hi, I'm also 17 and living in the UK. Despite the fact that I have been in the press/TV/etc... for several IT related things (including being the youngest computing student in the UK when I was 13) I have great difficulty getting in to IT events also. The most recent example would be "Linux Expo" organised by IT Events - a company with the unenlightened philosophy that anyone under the age of 18 (or students!) should not be allowed to attend their events. This is a stupid policy. Can't they realise that we represent the future of the IT industry and that we therefore deserve a rightful place at such preceedings. They need to MOVE with the times...
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but if anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but if anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
I've got it as a 19Mb MP3. I've already offered it to Rob and co, but it anyone's interested let me know and we'll see what we can do...
What you all seem to fail to realise is that M$ isn't "stupid" (depends on your definition - but just humour me for a second). Well, OK, I hate them as much as the most extream Linux advocate could ever possibly hate them, but the fact that they've lasted so long so far means that they (by whatever underhand, etc. tactics) are fairly successful. You'd have to be plain silly to think that this is the "first" study of this kind conducted my M$. I'll bet they have whole teams of people who work on parts of the Linux kernel. If I wanted to develop a commercially successful OS/Applications and there were open sourced applications of a similar nature - I'd be very interested in "borrowing" ideas too. Don't forget that they just bought a major UN*X company so we might be seeing signs of a shift in the M$ position? I just hope they ditch Winblows and concentrate on what they're good at - writing talking paperclips which are completely useless and hated by all, to be embeded into _reliable_ wordprocessors like vi :) Wanna mail me? wincrap2000@hotmail.com
OK so we have several guys A, B C, etc... Guy A posts a comment of some value which the Moderator (Guy B) thinks should be read be the entire world. They moderate the comment and make it higher. Guys C,D,E, etc.. basically just have a nasty grudge on B or else they just plain simply hate guy B. They moderate B so that he looses his moderating abilities, and then moderate amougst their friends to raise their "status" and permanently keep their moderation abilities. The answer is SIMPLY allow EITHER Meta Moderation OR Moderation BUT don't allow every moderator to be a Meta Moderator or the above situation will occur. There is absolutely nothing to be gained if a Meta Moderator without Moderation abilities tries something, or vice versa. Why? because system abusing [Meta] Moderators will be complained about in time to fix it. ANOTHER IDEA: Meta Moderators moderate Moderators and Moderators moderate Meta Moderators. If someone can't be both a moderator and a Meta Moderator, this would work nicely. This is a "wheels within wheels" type situation which (if you've heard GIS 4 recently) Rob should understand very well :) You might not read this becasue a moderation conspiracy will make this comment -10000000 because those guys don't like me :)
You know, what we really need is a E.T. based Beowolf cluster!
I'm not saying it was M$ in particular, but I did phone the UK and US hq's yesturday, and spoke to several "important" people to ask them "why is it that the 9th most popular book that _your_ company pays for is the Microsoft File: The secret case against Bill Gates?"!!! They were to say the least "dumbfounded" to hear that people such as myself know about their Anti M$ fealings! I expect a couple of similar cases occured yesturday.... Jon.
Sorry Rob, but the others are right - it only seems to affect queries via their web pages. I think that the 2 things which should concern us are: 1). We have to *pay* to download their ads. True it's only a small amount of extra data, but 2). who is (excuse the pun) to decide what material to allow in the form of adverts? A porn company (perhaps even the "open porn" company - I just listened to gis episode 4 for the 50th time :) might "justify" that they have every right to advertise via WHOIS. That then makes it illegal for many people (minors, those in China, etc...) to view the WHOIS database! not only that,but Ican forsee similar things to the RBL being imposed, then the sites which link to the whois database get censored for linking to it, etc... I hope this does happen because I really want NSI to go bankrupt and for the government to turn it (the WHOIS database) over to one of the non-profit groups that runs root servers (they know how to do things properly). NSI has no right to do this. This would be like the telephone company playing you an advert every time you ring 192 (directory assistance) - or whatever number it is that you guys dial in the US. Nobody's going to bother to read this so it don't matter much anyway... Jon.
My experience with MP3 started about 6 months ago. I used bladeenc at first and tried lame as well. What I really hated about bladeenc was the speed. Sure, the audio quality is fairly good and I would freely buy that guy many drinks for his hard work, but the time it takes on my PII-400 is just silly. I mean, it takes about 6 mins to encode that latest "number one" hit into an MP3. I tried LAME, which isn't as good in my opinion (I class myself as having a fairly good ear - I went to sony labs about 5-6 years ago when MiniDisc was first being developed and marketed and I could easily tell the difference between each of the various formats they had - I think that included MP3, but definitely the MPEG 1 stuff at the time). So LAME wasn't as good and took about the smae amount of time to encode. I looked around and found Xing. I purchased their encoder and found it to be fairly good. It sounds much better than bladeenc et al. and it can encode at nearly 4x which is excellent. Their are just a few things that ***YOU*** should know about our friends at xing. 1). They are about to be bought out by Real, so don't expect any product updates soon. 2). The enocder can encode at several times real time on my machine, but even using fifos, or whatever you care to try, there is *no* way to get the xing encoder to read from a mic input (e.g. via esd's PCM output from esdrec) and output in a mannor that would enable me to do live webcasts. This was very irritating as I couldn't understand why their program didn't like fifo's. 3). When I contacted the Xing support department, I got no reply for over 4 weeks and then all I got was a *RUDE* reply from someone who used offensive language to tell me where I could stick my..... etc... - when I threatened to *sue* them or take them to trading standards I received further unpleasant replies and I am left fealing that they have a very good encoder, but they have *incompetent* staff who have no idea of what they are doing, or of any knowledge of customer relations. IF YOU WANT A GOOD ENCODER, USE THE XING ENCODER - BUT BE WARNED, THEY NOT ONLY BITE, BUT SEND YOU OFFENSIVE OR OBSCENE REPLIES WHEN YOU MAIL THEM. I know that no-one will ever read this because it's way too far down the replies list for anyone to bother to read. Jon.
When's the linux kernel going to support it and the almighty question: can I have a beowolf clustering playstation - that would be cool :) yeah I know I asked it, but someone had to.
Have you been into a Tiny computers showroom recently? You'll find that they have a selection of cutaway/clear caseswhich they use to demonstrate the technology inside their machines to customers - maybe people should ask them about it.
Hi, Me and the guys at Oxlug meet the first Sundayof each month and have a drink before and after the meeting. I'm thinking I'm going to have to see if I can arrange (find some company willing to back the event) a similar event in the UK, get any ideas on this. I recon we'd have to wait now until after new year if we really wanna hire somewhere big and do it properly. Jon.
Here's some output: [mastersj@periscope mastersj]$ ping www.windows2000test.com ping: unknown host www.windows2000test.com [mastersj@periscope mastersj]$ ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.windows2000test.com/ The following error was encountered: ERROR 205 -- DNS name lookup failure. Please contact your system administrator. This means that: Host lookup www.windows2000test.com not available Web-Caching powered by Network Appliance. Generated by NetCache/3.4D3@www-cache.pol.co.uk:8080 Wed, 21 Jul 1999 13:51:06 GMT Broken retrieval invalidation Generated by NetCache/3.4D3@www-cache.freeserve.net:8080