You can't think of anything else besides large SMP systems that Linux does and NetBSD doesn't? Come on, you aren't trying very hard. Just off the top of my head, Linux has:
- Newbie-friendly installers with lots of really nice up to date free software (Ubuntu, FC4, etc.) - Lots of custom distributions for specialized purposes, live CDs, etc. - Accelerated 3D graphics with manufacturer-supported drivers. - Support contracts available from Oracle and other large players. - Hyperthreading support in scheduler. - Kernel event system (dbus, hal, hotplug, etc) - Device drivers for far more devices. - Security levels beyond standard POSIX (NSA-designed SELinux framework, etc.) - Really good, mature, journalling file systems. -... lots more, really.
Sure, NetBSD runs on more hardware. This is good if you want to create an embedded system with some obscure microcontroller.
But nobody choosing an operating system actually cares how many microprocessors are supported. They just care if their cpu is supported. And for 99.99% of the world, with linux, it is.
The killer for me is no harddrive. If it only had a 40 GB microdrive, (and if the price was reasonable) I would get one instead of an MP3 player.
I want a single, very portable, programmable, do-nearly-everything device, and this could have been it. I want:
- MP3 (and OGG and FLAC) playback with a usable UI
- Fits-in-a-pocket portability. A big pocket is ok.
- 40 GB hard drive at least. I have a lot of music that I want to carry around, and need space for email and apps too.
- 16 hour battery life at least, so it goes as long between charges as I go between sleeps
- Linux OS, useable APIs for writing graphical apps, Tiny-X preferred for portability. I want to be able to write apps for it.
- USB (to hook up a small portable keyboard)
- Serial (to hook up my GPS)
- Wireless internet
- A decent email / calendaring / scheduling / tasklist application.
- A decent web browse (i.e. Firefox)
This is close but not quite. But it is closer than anything else I've seen yet.
If steriods are actually a good thing, as claimed in the book, maybe lots of people will start using them.
Maybe all sorts of other performance enhancing (not just physical, but mental performance enhancing drugs) will become both popular and actually legal.
Right now the only mental performance enhancing drug that is widely used and actually promoted by employers giving it free to employees is caffiene.
What if the coffee room in your workplace had not only coffee but a whole rack of various drugs which would make you better able to concentrate, work longer, even just smarter?
I'm a software developer, and if stuff like this was both safe (REALLY safe) and available I think I'd use it, especially during crunch time.
So that's why this review is on Slashdot. The attitude behind the book matters, even to non-sports-fan nerds.
First, there wasn't much hope of catching Bin Laden. (Oh yeah, remember him?) so we needed a new target.
Second, the US economy (and thus Bush's re-election) totally depends on cheap oil, due to US foot-dragging on energy conservation. Unfortunately the world's largest reserves and current producer of oil is Saudia Arabia, an unstable monarchy where the royalty is best-buddies with the Bush family but the ordinary man-in-the street has no love at all for the US. (11 of the 12 9-11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.) Saudia Arabia has immense leverage on the price of oil in the world. If Saudia Arabia was to become a democratic country or a conservative Muslim state it would be a disaster for the US.
Third: Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil, but has almost no current production. Replacing Saddam with a US puppet government would ensure a cheap and plentiful supply of oil for America, thus keeping the US economy ticking along, thus getting Bush re-elected.
Everything that has happened since Bush first mentioned the "axis of evil" is a straightforward and predictable result of the three previous points. Unfortunately for Bush, installing a puppet govt. in Iraq has turned out to be a lot harder than he expected.
So after all the evidence of lies and deception, the loss of civil liberties, the thousands of people (on both sides) killed in Iraq... why on earth do many Americans support Bush? What the hell are they thinking?
I believe there are three main categories of Republican voters. The first are the ignorant who simply don't understand what Bush stands for or what he's doing. They just aren't paying attention.
The second group is conservative Christians who believe that Bush is better for family values, standing against abortion, etc. They are making a serious mistake. Not only is Bush a liar, as a "liberal" Christian I find his policies horrifying and about as far from the value system Jesus presented as it is possible to be. Love those who hate you, do good to those who wish you harm, do not love money, do not be proud and arrogant... Bush's actions are totally opposed to all those real Christian values, despite what he says.
The third group are intelligent people who completely understand what's going on and just don't care - they want low taxes and cheap gas to put into their SUVs, and damn the consequences as long as it isn't their kids dying in Iraq.
To that's the state of US politics as I see it. It makes me ashamed to be an American citizen.
This might be your lucky day, when an Ask Slashdot turns up exactly what you're looking for.
I have written the code you might need - since I needed to solve exactly the same problem. I work at Myrio - we do software for set top boxes for playing digital television over IP networks, typically VDSL.
Anyway - the video encoders stream out MPEG-2 encapsulated multicast IP, but sometimes the content providers get antsy about the possibility that someone could just put a packet sniffer on the network and get top-quality DTV video. (It's easy to play back the streams with open-source software.)
So, I modified the Linux ethernet bridge software to encrypt each ethernet packet crossing the bridge using 128-bit AES encryption. By doing it in-kernel, maximum speed and minimum latency is achieved. The source and destination addresses are untouched since it's an ethernet bridge. So you don't need to modify the video encoders, or the DSL head end or any other components of the network. You stick the encrypting bridge between the output of the encoders and your head-end router.
Streams can be encrypted by the destination address (useful for unicast VOD) or by the source address (useful for multicast DTV).
On the linux-based set top box client, we did the AES decryption in user-space, inside our proprietary application and libraries.
The key exchange was done at a higher level, using Java crypto services. You're on your own for that, our implementation was not GPL.
The code never entered production, however - it was done as a proof of concept and demonstrated at the SuperComm 2002 conference. It worked pretty well - IIRC a 733 Mhz Pentium 3 could encrypt over 10 5-megabit MPEG2 streams simultaneously with some CPU power left over for key negotiation, etc.
Lucky for you, it's GPL'ed. You can grab the patches and other useful info from my website. It is a little out of date though, the patches are for an older 2.4 kernel. I'd be happy to answer questions about it if you want to work on it.
As for the wisdom of doing stuff like this... well, I have mixed feelings. I don't think that encrypting content to protect it is wrong, as long as fair use is preserved. And it is, in this case - anyone can hook up a VCR to the output of the set top box and record, just like recording shows off cable or satellite or anything else. So we didn't take away anyone's rights. Also, no one is forced to buy this service - if they don't like it, they have alternatives.
On the other hand I do think it's just stupid. Content companies are way, way too paranoid about the internet.
We have the technology to put the whole back catalog of shows on our service using video-on-demand - imagine if you could watch any Simpson's episode, any time you want, for maybe 50 cents each. Or buy in bulk - 10 bucks gets you 25 shows any time you want, with full fast-forward & rewind capability, your choice of any episode of Simpsons / Family Guy / Star Trek / Friends / NYPD Blue / Seinfeld Show / whatever.
It's so frustrating. Customers want it, we have the technology to deliver it, but studios won't do it because they're scared and stupid. If they had the guts we could all make a lot of money, and no-one would ever say "there's nothing on TV" again.
I agree with 90% of your post, but disagree that the ability to load your own BIOS means you will be able to get access to the secret keys, and get your own code to appear to be "trusted".
As you say: The only way it could be secure is to have the hardware have the list of trustworthy keys and have the hardware never give up control to anything that is considered untrusted.
The solution? The utility which loads / flashes the BIOS with your customized, open source version will first wipe out all the private keys. You won't be able to subvert that utility - the first time you run it, it will have been loaded by a "trusted" operating system which was started by a "trusted" BIOS, and those two things will work together to ensure that the BIOS update utility is also signed and "trusted". The signed, trusted update utility will wipe the secure key storage clean, making your computer untrusted.
So, sure, you can modify your BIOS, install open source firmware and an open source operating system, and control your hardware right down to the bare metal.
But you won't be able to break any DRM system just from that... by the time any code that you control gets to run, the keys will be gone, and your computer will be "untrusted". Probably permanently.
Personally, that's fine with me - as long as I can buy a computer and load Linux onto it, I don't care if Microsoft and the MPAA and the RIAA trust my computer to keep secrets from me. (I don't expect I'll be wanting to buy music or movies or software from them anyway).
Christians (at least _informed_ Christians, yes there are some) in particular, would not be disturbed to find that God had created life in more than one place. Why shouldn't He? It's not like the Bible says somewhere in it "Oh, and by the way... this planet is the only one with life on it."
C.S. Lewis discussed the subject fairly completely in an essay decades ago. In case you don't know, he was a famous and very influential Christian author, as well as writing some science fiction and fantasy. Besides writing a non-fiction essay about it, you could view his "Space Trilogy" fiction as an examination of the life-on-other-planets issue with a Christian background.
The more interesting question (also discussed by C.S. Lewis and many others) is how different religions would react to the discovery of _intelligent_ life somewhere else in the universe.
Microbes on Mars... scientifically, that's amazing. From a religious point of view... well, it's "just" another example of a Creator God at work.
Well, this would still help determine what the common code is.
If ESR is given the big list of MD5 sums of SCO's kernel by someone who has legitimate access to it, and he runs his shred tool to compare it to the Linux kernel, and a bunch of stuff turns up matching (as expected) he can still see WHAT was matching because he has the Linux sources.
So then he can look at that and say, "hmmm, it looks like part of this ethernet driver is the same, and this NAT implementation, and bits and pieces of the VFAT filesystem code..." and then, find out how those got to be the way they are in Linux.
If it can be proved that the matching code is totally legit in Linux, (which is what I would expect) then it follows that either (a) SCO actually stole stuff out of Linux, rather than the reverse, or (b) Linux and SCO both took the code from a third source, like BSD.
Otherwise, option (c) is that Linux actually contains code from SCO which it should not. But this is still an improvement on the current situation, because it would allow the Linux development team to FIX THE PROBLEM.
Either way, (sooner or later, depending on if Linux fixes are required) it will shoot SCO's claims so full of holes that any reputable journalist reporting on SCO's latest insane claims will have to mention that "... but the source code has been analyzed and all code in Linux similar to SCO's software has been shown to be completely legitimate...", or "... but all code in Linux which SCO might have had a valid issue about has been removed..."
SCO's big stick right now is FUD. Fear, Uncertainity, and Doubt. The shred tool can remove the uncertainty and doubt. Only SCO will still have the Fear.:-)
Hey, good idea. But I use a lot more than just Samba, so how about this...
An Open Invitation
To: Any developer who has contributed something significant to a project (*) listed below,
If you are ever visiting Kirkland, Washington, email me. I'll be happy to take you out for a drink or two. Free Beer for Free Software!
Thanks for all the work you do!
* The Linux Kernel, X Windows, GCC, glibc, Mozilla, Samba, Gnome, Evolution, Ogg Vorbis, LAME, Busybox, and uClibc. (These are just the projects I use and appreciate every day.)
(PS. I reserve the right to decide what a "significant" contribution is, if only to avoid going broke buying drinks for hundreds of people!)
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language
on
Worst Linux Annoyances?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, I think the ideal thing would be:
when running X, if I hit the eject button, and some app is using the CD, I should get a popup dialog on my screen saying specifically which app (or apps) are accessing the CD, what files they have open, and giving me three options:
"Do you want to (a) eject anyway, possibly causing problems with those applications, (b) close the applications and then retry the eject, or (c) cancel?"
When running at the command prompt, when the eject button is pushed I'd be happy just to see a message printed on the console stating which app or apps (and their PID's) have files open on the CD.
I think there may be hardware limitations in some CD/DVD drives that would not allow this to work in every case, but if it could work on 90% of hardware that would be good enough for me...
Well, yeah, an assembly guru can write kick-ass optimized code for a specific CPU - but that's why assembly sucks.
You can hand-tune your assembly to be the fastest possible on the i586 with it's 32 K of icache and 32 K of dcache (iirc), but what will you do when you want to run it on a i686 or Athlon with different instruction timings, different cache architectures, and different bus and memory speeds? Suddenly your hand-tuned assembly isn't so optimal anymore. You have to get out a whole other set of CPU reference manuals, recalculate all your instruction timings and loop sizes, and recode it all. Basically redo all your optimizations from the start. You will probably need to change the level of loop unrolling and function inlining you do, so the rewriting required is non-trivial.
But if you write in C, you just switch the optimization flags and recompile. It may not be 100% optimal for any one architecture, but you can get pretty darn good optimization for a whole lot of architectures with one set of source code.
Also, remember that in most computer programs, 90% of the runtime is in about 10% of the code. So even if you're a hard-core assembler guru, you'd be much better off writing hand-optimized routines for the 10% of the code that actually matters, and leave the rest to the C compiler.
Writing everything in assembly is stupid. Really!
(Well, it's kind of cool in a geeky sort of way, like building your own 16-bit computer from chips, wire, and solder is cool,... but it isn't very productive, and it isn't even optimal unless you're willing to rewrite everything for every sub-architecture your code is ever going to run on.)
Just don't assume that assembler (even hand tuned) == fast.
3. SCO distributed the allegedly-copyrighted work themselves, and have therefore licensed it under GPL
I'm not sure it's no simple. SCO will no doubt argue that, at the time, they didn't realise the source contained their copyrighted material.
No, it is that simple.
SCO is Right Now, Today distributing the 2.4 linux kernel from their web site. With all the relevant code and GPL notices. This has been pointed out repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. SCO cannot plausibly claim that they don't know NOW that they're distributing it.
Like it says... the patents are licensed. Read the GPL, it is not incompatible with patents. It just says they have to be licensed so that they won't be a problem for people using the code.
So IBM wrote a license for their RCU patents which says (briefly) that anyone can use it in GPL'ed code.
And there you go - no conflict.
Of course IBM can still sue people who use the RCU stuff in NON-GPL'ed code, unless those people get a separate license to do so.
Bogus! Fast food is really expensive for what you get. Consider the amount of real nutrition per dollar. Fast food is mostly grease, starch, and sugar - empty calories.
Moderately poor people would be much better off buying fresh veggies and inexpensive varieties of meat and cooking it themselves. They would be healthier and save money.
And even for the very poor, who basically have to buy the maximum calories per dollar just to stay alive, fast food is a lousy deal. For the price of a MacDonald's combo meal, a smart poor person could buy three or four meals worth of much healthier food if they prepared and cooked it themselves.
If poor people want to eat out, there are healthier, cheaper restaurant alternatives that could be exempted from the fast food tax - gyros, wraps, heck, even Subway.
So I'd argue that a tax on fast food isn't a tax on the poor, it's a tax on people who make poor eating choices -- just like the tax supporters suggest. I think it's a great idea. Tax the hell out of junk food, just like cigarettes.
Well, I'd rather not have AAC and the Digital Restrictions Managment crap that goes with it. AAC is zero advantage to me. I have no interest in buying DRM-protected songs from a limited selection for a dollar each. I prefer to buy used and independent CDs. No DRM, good selection, much less than $1 per song... admittedly, a lot of individual songs aren't great.
But I'd much rather have a really big hard drive, and stick with my high-bitrate MP3 and OGG files. At an average 256 Kbps with VBR, it's very, very hard to hear any difference from the original.
In other words, a big hard drive would provide quality as well as quantity.
And, I really would fill that 60 GB with music. I have over 140 GB of MP3 and OGG files right now in fact, and it's much more convenient to just mirror big chunks of the collection rather than picking and choosing individual CDs or files.
I just want to know if I can use the Zen from Linux. If so I'll probably buy one, it looks great. If it supports OGG, I'll get one for sure.
Where can I get A "Not designed for Windows XP" logo?
That's a great idea! If someone made sweatshirts, T Shirts, and coffee mugs with that on one side, and a penguin/linux logo on the other, I would buy a big box of 'em.
Announcements like this always say "workstations and servers". Don't they think that Linux users want portable devices?
I just want a good quality Linux laptop with firewire, a built-in CDR, lots of RAM, and a power-efficient CPU. I don't want to pay the Windows tax and I don't want an expensive, high speed CPU.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 2 GHz CPU in a laptop is a mystery to me. )
The Lindows "$799" machine would have been perfect but it has no built in CD drive - a fatal deficiency, at least to me.
Well, I have to agree that they would not make good movies, but only because most people wouldn't consider an 8 hour movie to be good no matter what. It isn't quite extreme as transitioning a symphony to a painting - after all, both books and movies have characters, plots, settings, dialog...
I agree that there needs to be an adaptation, and a paragraph-by-paragraph text to movie transformation would not work. I actually mostly liked the Lord Of The Rings - Fellowship Of The Ring. That was an adaptation - Jackson made cuts, but stuck to the story line. He was in his "Smeagol" mode.
But The Two Towers wasn't an adaptation, it was a rewrite. It should have been called: The Two Towers: A Movie Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings. Jackson went into "Gollum" mode made all sorts of totally unneeded changes in the plot, dialog, and characters. He didn't just make cuts, he added unnecessary stuff that wasn't even in the original books! The resulting "plot" doesn't even make sense. Bah.
I have to admit my idea of the perfect Lord Of The Rings movie would be to film almost every scene and with a minimum of adaptation, and almost no changes to the dialog. The significant change I'd make would be to film the "flashback" stuff (like most of the Council Of Elrond) and not just have Aragorn, Gandalf, Elrond, and the rest sitting around the table talking to each other, and present a lot of that before the real beginning of the book and Bilbo's Birthday party.
But it would be very long, too long for a movie. Perhaps it could be done as a TV series - one years worth of 1 hour episodes, one per week.
Anyway, unless it could be produced quite cheaply it would never be a commercial success, so I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.
To get back on topic (i.e. Niven, Ringworld, and movies...) I do think that most books would be better adapted to a 8 to 40 hour TV series than jammed into a 2 hour movie.
Not just SF book-to-movie transitions suck. Most book-to-movie adaptations are disappointing. My theory is that directors, producers, and screenwriters just cannot help messing with the story. They have to "make it their own", or "put their creative stamp" on it, or show that they can be creative story tellers too, or something. And, inevitably, they take a great story, carefully crafted by a single author, and screw it up.
The most disappointing to me was LOTR: The Two Towers. It's an instructive case as to what happens to books when they become movies, even when the person in charge actually cares about the project. I think of Peter Jackson as Smeagol/Gollum now. His good side is (Smeagol voice) "Good Tolkien! I'll make the movie as much like the book as I can! And the bad side is (Gollum voice) "The movie is my precious! MINE! MINE! I can write a better story than Tolkien, gollum!
Anyway, I think something like that happens whenever a great story gets into the hands of a bunch of egotistical movie makers and Hollywood types.
I have to admit I'd love to see Cryptonomicon, Ringworld, A Fire Upon The Deep, Neuromancer, and dozens of other stories as movies, but only if they were done right.
But the lesson from The Lord Of The Rings is that will never happen.
Each of those great stories would be shortened, condensed, sliced, diced, and rewritten. The dialog would be altered, plotlines scrambled, characters changed, motives lost, and connections cut. Gratuituous romance, special effects, sex, and lowbrow humor would be added in an attempt to put back what had been lost from the cuts.
By the time it makes it to the screen, it's a ruined wreck, and anyone who loves the original story can only weep for what has been lost.
Better to just read the book again and let the movie play out inside my imagination.
Yes, Ken Thompson really did that. And yes, even though the GNU system is written from scratch, gcc could theoretically have a built-in trojan like that.
To be specific, gcc could detect when it was compiling OpenSSH (for instance) and insert code that would put a back door into OpenSSH. And gcc would also detect when it was compiling any version of itself, so that it could put into the new gcc the code for detecting if it's compiling OpenSSH (or itself) and inserting the trojan code.
And if all that was done, you could take the original trojan code out of the visible gcc source code, but the trojan would stay in.
However, I'm not worried about this, since gcc can and often is compiled by OTHER C compilers. And in fact, it often is. So if you are super-paranoid, do this:
Start with something like an old version of Solaris. Use the system compiler to compile yourself a fresh installation of a nice new gcc from sources which you have checked for back doors.
Then you can almost certainly trust the resulting gcc, since it would be very very hard for the old Solaris C compiler to recognize that it was compiling a gcc compiler (which didn't exist when the Solaris compiler was created) and put in a trojan.
So now you can compile all the rest of your open-source system with your trusted gcc and be happy.
(Since gcc works just fine as a cross-compiler, you can bootstrap yourself onto a Intel/Linux box from a Solaris machine. It's a lot of work though.)
I play bass and I've got a POD Pro that I've been really happy with.
One of the neat things about it is that when you select an amp model, the bass, treble, drive, and other controls on the POD behave the way those controls would on the real amp.
Without having played through all of the different amps and cabinets that the POD emulates, it's hard for me to say how accurate all the emulations are. But the SWR model does sound a lot like my SWR amp, and the Ampeg model definitely seems to have the SVT feel to it.
The manual has an interesting description of all the different amps and cabinets that they modeled, along with some history of the companies and designers that produced them, and some of the well known bands and recordings that used them.
The SPDIF out (on the Pro model) and all the other in and out connections are really useful. If you play bass or guitar you should check one out.
I call BS on your silly assertion that "biological system's don't have free gasses floating around."
On the contrary, your cells are full of oxygen dissolved in water. Or don't you breathe? You also have carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and all sorts of other gases from air dissolved in your body.
(The dissolved nitrogen is what causes the bends when divers come up too fast.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, a lot of the information or "general feedback: you think you would be willing to pay $500 for is available for free from Google.
Look up Webmaster Tools. http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Look up Sitemaps, and look up Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics
Disclaimer: I work for Google but I am not speaking for them officially here... just trying to spread some useful information!
You can't think of anything else besides large SMP systems that Linux does and NetBSD doesn't? Come on, you aren't trying very hard. Just off the top of my head, Linux has:
... lots more, really.
- Newbie-friendly installers with lots of really nice up to date free software (Ubuntu, FC4, etc.)
- Lots of custom distributions for specialized purposes, live CDs, etc.
- Accelerated 3D graphics with manufacturer-supported drivers.
- Support contracts available from Oracle and other large players.
- Hyperthreading support in scheduler.
- Kernel event system (dbus, hal, hotplug, etc)
- Device drivers for far more devices.
- Security levels beyond standard POSIX (NSA-designed SELinux framework, etc.)
- Really good, mature, journalling file systems.
-
Sure, NetBSD runs on more hardware. This is good if you want to create an embedded system with some obscure microcontroller.
But nobody choosing an operating system actually cares how many microprocessors are supported. They just care if their cpu is supported. And for 99.99% of the world, with linux, it is.
The killer for me is no harddrive. If it only had a 40 GB microdrive, (and if the price was reasonable) I would get one instead of an MP3 player.
I want a single, very portable, programmable, do-nearly-everything device, and this could have been it. I want:
- MP3 (and OGG and FLAC) playback with a usable UI
- Fits-in-a-pocket portability. A big pocket is ok.
- 40 GB hard drive at least. I have a lot of music that I want to carry around, and need space for email and apps too.
- 16 hour battery life at least, so it goes as long between charges as I go between sleeps
- Linux OS, useable APIs for writing graphical apps, Tiny-X preferred for portability. I want to be able to write apps for it.
- USB (to hook up a small portable keyboard)
- Serial (to hook up my GPS)
- Wireless internet
- A decent email / calendaring / scheduling / tasklist application.
- A decent web browse (i.e. Firefox)
This is close but not quite. But it is closer than anything else I've seen yet.
With 400 exhibitors, each one gets almost 7 city blocks each.
:-)
I know trade show booths have been getting bigger, but that's ridiculous
Biotech.
If steriods are actually a good thing, as claimed in the book, maybe lots of people will start using them.
Maybe all sorts of other performance enhancing (not just physical, but mental performance enhancing drugs) will become both popular and actually legal.
Right now the only mental performance enhancing drug that is widely used and actually promoted by employers giving it free to employees is caffiene.
What if the coffee room in your workplace had not only coffee but a whole rack of various drugs which would make you better able to concentrate, work longer, even just smarter?
I'm a software developer, and if stuff like this was both safe (REALLY safe) and available I think I'd use it, especially during crunch time.
So that's why this review is on Slashdot. The attitude behind the book matters, even to non-sports-fan nerds.
Bush had excellent reasons to bomb Iraq.
... why on earth do many Americans support Bush? What the hell are they thinking?
First, there wasn't much hope of catching Bin Laden. (Oh yeah, remember him?) so we needed a new target.
Second, the US economy (and thus Bush's re-election) totally depends on cheap oil, due to US foot-dragging on energy conservation. Unfortunately the world's largest reserves and current producer of oil is Saudia Arabia, an unstable monarchy where the royalty is best-buddies with the Bush family but the ordinary man-in-the street has no love at all for the US. (11 of the 12 9-11 hijackers were Saudi citizens.) Saudia Arabia has immense leverage on the price of oil in the world. If Saudia Arabia was to become a democratic country or a conservative Muslim state it would be a disaster for the US.
Third: Iraq has the world's second-largest reserves of oil, but has almost no current production. Replacing Saddam with a US puppet government would ensure a cheap and plentiful supply of oil for America, thus keeping the US economy ticking along, thus getting Bush re-elected.
Everything that has happened since Bush first mentioned the "axis of evil" is a straightforward and predictable result of the three previous points. Unfortunately for Bush, installing a puppet govt. in Iraq has turned out to be a lot harder than he expected.
So after all the evidence of lies and deception, the loss of civil liberties, the thousands of people (on both sides) killed in Iraq
I believe there are three main categories of Republican voters. The first are the ignorant who simply don't understand what Bush stands for or what he's doing. They just aren't paying attention.
The second group is conservative Christians who believe that Bush is better for family values, standing against abortion, etc. They are making a serious mistake. Not only is Bush a liar, as a "liberal" Christian I find his policies horrifying and about as far from the value system Jesus presented as it is possible to be. Love those who hate you, do good to those who wish you harm, do not love money, do not be proud and arrogant... Bush's actions are totally opposed to all those real Christian values, despite what he says.
The third group are intelligent people who completely understand what's going on and just don't care - they want low taxes and cheap gas to put into their SUVs, and damn the consequences as long as it isn't their kids dying in Iraq.
To that's the state of US politics as I see it. It makes me ashamed to be an American citizen.
This might be your lucky day, when an Ask Slashdot turns up exactly what you're looking for.
I have written the code you might need - since I needed to solve exactly the same problem. I work at Myrio - we do software for set top boxes for playing digital television over IP networks, typically VDSL.
Anyway - the video encoders stream out MPEG-2 encapsulated multicast IP, but sometimes the content providers get antsy about the possibility that someone could just put a packet sniffer on the network and get top-quality DTV video. (It's easy to play back the streams with open-source software.)
So, I modified the Linux ethernet bridge software to encrypt each ethernet packet crossing the bridge using 128-bit AES encryption. By doing it in-kernel, maximum speed and minimum latency is achieved. The source and destination addresses are untouched since it's an ethernet bridge. So you don't need to modify the video encoders, or the DSL head end or any other components of the network. You stick the encrypting bridge between the output of the encoders and your head-end router.
Streams can be encrypted by the destination address (useful for unicast VOD) or by the source address (useful for multicast DTV).
On the linux-based set top box client, we did the AES decryption in user-space, inside our proprietary application and libraries.
The key exchange was done at a higher level, using Java crypto services. You're on your own for that, our implementation was not GPL.
The code never entered production, however - it was done as a proof of concept and demonstrated at the SuperComm 2002 conference. It worked pretty well - IIRC a 733 Mhz Pentium 3 could encrypt over 10 5-megabit MPEG2 streams simultaneously with some CPU power left over for key negotiation, etc.
Lucky for you, it's GPL'ed. You can grab the patches and other useful info from
my website. It is a little out of date though, the patches are for an older 2.4 kernel. I'd be happy to answer questions about it if you want to work on it.
As for the wisdom of doing stuff like this... well, I have mixed feelings. I don't think that encrypting content to protect it is wrong, as long as fair use is preserved. And it is, in this case - anyone can hook up a VCR to the output of the set top box and record, just like recording shows off cable or satellite or anything else. So we didn't take away anyone's rights. Also, no one is forced to buy this service - if they don't like it, they have alternatives.
On the other hand I do think it's just stupid. Content companies are way, way too paranoid about the internet.
We have the technology to put the whole back catalog of shows on our service using video-on-demand - imagine if you could watch any Simpson's episode, any time you want, for maybe 50 cents each. Or buy in bulk - 10 bucks gets you 25 shows any time you want, with full fast-forward & rewind capability, your choice of any episode of Simpsons / Family Guy / Star Trek / Friends / NYPD Blue / Seinfeld Show / whatever.
It's so frustrating. Customers want it, we have the technology to deliver it, but studios won't do it because they're scared and stupid. If they had the guts we could all make a lot of money, and no-one would ever say "there's nothing on TV" again.
I agree with 90% of your post, but disagree that the ability to load your own BIOS means you will be able to get access to the secret keys, and get your own code to appear to be "trusted".
As you say: The only way it could be secure is to have the hardware have the list of trustworthy keys and have the hardware never give up control to anything that is considered untrusted.
The solution? The utility which loads / flashes the BIOS with your customized, open source version will first wipe out all the private keys. You won't be able to subvert that utility - the first time you run it, it will have been loaded by a "trusted" operating system which was started by a "trusted" BIOS, and those two things will work together to ensure that the BIOS update utility is also signed and "trusted". The signed, trusted update utility will wipe the secure key storage clean, making your computer untrusted.
So, sure, you can modify your BIOS, install open source firmware and an open source operating system, and control your hardware right down to the bare metal.
But you won't be able to break any DRM system just from that... by the time any code that you control gets to run, the keys will be gone, and your computer will be "untrusted". Probably permanently.
Personally, that's fine with me - as long as I can buy a computer and load Linux onto it, I don't care if Microsoft and the MPAA and the RIAA trust my computer to keep secrets from me. (I don't expect I'll be wanting to buy music or movies or software from them anyway).
Why would most religions care?
Christians (at least _informed_ Christians, yes there are some) in particular, would not be disturbed to find that God had created life in more than one place. Why shouldn't He? It's not like the Bible says somewhere in it "Oh, and by the way... this planet is the only one with life on it."
C.S. Lewis discussed the subject fairly completely in an essay decades ago. In case you don't know, he was a famous and very influential Christian author, as well as writing some science fiction and fantasy. Besides writing a non-fiction essay about it, you could view his "Space Trilogy" fiction as an examination of the life-on-other-planets issue with a Christian background.
The more interesting question (also discussed by C.S. Lewis and many others) is how different religions would react to the discovery of _intelligent_ life somewhere else in the universe.
Microbes on Mars... scientifically, that's amazing. From a religious point of view... well, it's "just" another example of a Creator God at work.
Well, this would still help determine what the common code is.
:-)
If ESR is given the big list of MD5 sums of SCO's kernel by someone who has legitimate access to it, and he runs his shred tool to compare it to the Linux kernel, and a bunch of stuff turns up matching (as expected) he can still see WHAT was matching because he has the Linux sources.
So then he can look at that and say, "hmmm, it looks like part of this ethernet driver is the same, and this NAT implementation, and bits and pieces of the VFAT filesystem code..." and then, find out how those got to be the way they are in Linux.
If it can be proved that the matching code is totally legit in Linux, (which is what I would expect) then it follows that either (a) SCO actually stole stuff out of Linux, rather than the reverse, or (b) Linux and SCO both took the code from a third source, like BSD.
Otherwise, option (c) is that Linux actually contains code from SCO which it should not. But this is still an improvement on the current situation, because it would allow the Linux development team to FIX THE PROBLEM.
Either way, (sooner or later, depending on if Linux fixes are required) it will shoot SCO's claims so full of holes that any reputable journalist reporting on SCO's latest insane claims will have to mention that "... but the source code has been analyzed and all code in Linux similar to SCO's software has been shown to be completely legitimate...", or "... but all code in Linux which SCO might have had a valid issue about has been removed..."
SCO's big stick right now is FUD. Fear, Uncertainity, and Doubt. The shred tool can remove the uncertainty and doubt. Only SCO will still have the Fear.
Hey, good idea. But I use a lot more than just Samba, so how about this...
An Open Invitation
To: Any developer who has contributed something significant to a project (*) listed below,
If you are ever visiting Kirkland, Washington, email me. I'll be happy to take you out for a drink or two. Free Beer for Free Software!
Thanks for all the work you do!
* The Linux Kernel, X Windows, GCC, glibc, Mozilla, Samba, Gnome, Evolution, Ogg Vorbis, LAME, Busybox, and uClibc. (These are just the projects I use and appreciate every day.)
(PS. I reserve the right to decide what a "significant" contribution is, if only to avoid going broke buying drinks for hundreds of people!)
Yeah, I think the ideal thing would be:
when running X, if I hit the eject button, and some app is using the CD, I should get a popup dialog on my screen saying specifically which app (or apps) are accessing the CD, what files they have open, and giving me three options:
"Do you want to (a) eject anyway, possibly causing problems with those applications, (b) close the applications and then retry the eject, or (c) cancel?"
When running at the command prompt, when the eject button is pushed I'd be happy just to see a message printed on the console stating which app or apps (and their PID's) have files open on the CD.
I think there may be hardware limitations in some CD/DVD drives that would not allow this to work in every case, but if it could work on 90% of hardware that would be good enough for me...
Well, yeah, an assembly guru can write kick-ass optimized code for a specific CPU - but that's why assembly sucks.
... but it isn't very productive, and it isn't even optimal unless you're willing to rewrite everything for every sub-architecture your code is ever going to run on.)
You can hand-tune your assembly to be the fastest possible on the i586 with it's 32 K of icache and 32 K of dcache (iirc), but what will you do when you want to run it on a i686 or Athlon with different instruction timings, different cache architectures, and different bus and memory speeds? Suddenly your hand-tuned assembly isn't so optimal anymore. You have to get out a whole other set of CPU reference manuals, recalculate all your instruction timings and loop sizes, and recode it all. Basically redo all your optimizations from the start. You will probably need to change the level of loop unrolling and function inlining you do, so the rewriting required is non-trivial.
But if you write in C, you just switch the optimization flags and recompile. It may not be 100% optimal for any one architecture, but you can get pretty darn good optimization for a whole lot of architectures with one set of source code.
Also, remember that in most computer programs, 90% of the runtime is in about 10% of the code. So even if you're a hard-core assembler guru, you'd be much better off writing hand-optimized routines for the 10% of the code that actually matters, and leave the rest to the C compiler.
Writing everything in assembly is stupid. Really!
(Well, it's kind of cool in a geeky sort of way, like building your own 16-bit computer from chips, wire, and solder is cool,
Just don't assume that assembler (even hand tuned) == fast.
SCO is Right Now, Today distributing the 2.4 linux kernel from their web site. With all the relevant code and GPL notices. This has been pointed out repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. SCO cannot plausibly claim that they don't know NOW that they're distributing it.
Like it says... the patents are licensed. Read the GPL, it is not incompatible with patents. It just says they have to be licensed so that they won't be a problem for people using the code.
So IBM wrote a license for their RCU patents which says (briefly) that anyone can use it in GPL'ed code.
And there you go - no conflict.
Of course IBM can still sue people who use the RCU stuff in NON-GPL'ed code, unless those people get a separate license to do so.
Bogus! Fast food is really expensive for what you get. Consider the amount of real nutrition per dollar. Fast food is mostly grease, starch, and sugar - empty calories.
Moderately poor people would be much better off buying fresh veggies and inexpensive varieties of meat and cooking it themselves. They would be healthier and save money.
And even for the very poor, who basically have to buy the maximum calories per dollar just to stay alive, fast food is a lousy deal. For the price of a MacDonald's combo meal, a smart poor person could buy three or four meals worth of much healthier food if they prepared and cooked it themselves.
If poor people want to eat out, there are healthier, cheaper restaurant alternatives that could be exempted from the fast food tax - gyros, wraps, heck, even Subway.
So I'd argue that a tax on fast food isn't a tax on the poor, it's a tax on people who make poor eating choices -- just like the tax supporters suggest. I think it's a great idea. Tax the hell out of junk food, just like cigarettes.
Well, I'd rather not have AAC and the Digital Restrictions Managment crap that goes with it. AAC is zero advantage to me. I have no interest in buying DRM-protected songs from a limited selection for a dollar each. I prefer to buy used and independent CDs. No DRM, good selection, much less than $1 per song... admittedly, a lot of individual songs aren't great.
But I'd much rather have a really big hard drive, and stick with my high-bitrate MP3 and OGG files. At an average 256 Kbps with VBR, it's very, very hard to hear any difference from the original.
In other words, a big hard drive would provide quality as well as quantity.
And, I really would fill that 60 GB with music. I have over 140 GB of MP3 and OGG files right now in fact, and it's much more convenient to just mirror big chunks of the collection rather than picking and choosing individual CDs or files.
I just want to know if I can use the Zen from Linux. If so I'll probably buy one, it looks great. If it supports OGG, I'll get one for sure.
If someone made sweatshirts, T Shirts, and coffee mugs with that on one side, and a penguin/linux logo on the other, I would buy a big box of 'em.
ThinkGeek? CafePress? Someone?
Announcements like this always say "workstations and servers". Don't they think that Linux users want portable devices?
I just want a good quality Linux laptop with firewire, a built-in CDR, lots of RAM, and a power-efficient CPU. I don't want to pay the Windows tax and I don't want an expensive, high speed CPU.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 2 GHz CPU in a laptop is a mystery to me. )
The Lindows "$799" machine would have been perfect but it has no built in CD drive - a fatal deficiency, at least to me.
Well, I have to agree that they would not make good movies, but only because most people wouldn't consider an 8 hour movie to be good no matter what. It isn't quite extreme as transitioning a symphony to a painting - after all, both books and movies have characters, plots, settings, dialog...
I agree that there needs to be an adaptation, and a paragraph-by-paragraph text to movie transformation would not work. I actually mostly liked the Lord Of The Rings - Fellowship Of The Ring. That was an adaptation - Jackson made cuts, but stuck to the story line. He was in his "Smeagol" mode.
But The Two Towers wasn't an adaptation, it was a rewrite. It should have been called: The Two Towers: A Movie Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings. Jackson went into "Gollum" mode made all sorts of totally unneeded changes in the plot, dialog, and characters. He didn't just make cuts, he added unnecessary stuff that wasn't even in the original books! The resulting "plot" doesn't even make sense. Bah.
I have to admit my idea of the perfect Lord Of The Rings movie would be to film almost every scene and with a minimum of adaptation, and almost no changes to the dialog. The significant change I'd make would be to film the "flashback" stuff (like most of the Council Of Elrond) and not just have Aragorn, Gandalf, Elrond, and the rest sitting around the table talking to each other, and present a lot of that before the real beginning of the book and Bilbo's Birthday party.
But it would be very long, too long for a movie. Perhaps it could be done as a TV series - one years worth of 1 hour episodes, one per week.
Anyway, unless it could be produced quite cheaply it would never be a commercial success, so I don't expect to see it in my lifetime.
To get back on topic (i.e. Niven, Ringworld, and movies...) I do think that most books would be better adapted to a 8 to 40 hour TV series than jammed into a 2 hour movie.
Not just SF book-to-movie transitions suck. Most book-to-movie adaptations are disappointing. My theory is that directors, producers, and screenwriters just cannot help messing with the story. They have to "make it their own", or "put their creative stamp" on it, or show that they can be creative story tellers too, or something. And, inevitably, they take a great story, carefully crafted by a single author, and screw it up.
The most disappointing to me was LOTR: The Two Towers. It's an instructive case as to what happens to books when they become movies, even when the person in charge actually cares about the project. I think of Peter Jackson as Smeagol/Gollum now. His good side is (Smeagol voice) "Good Tolkien! I'll make the movie as much like the book as I can! And the bad side is (Gollum voice) "The movie is my precious! MINE! MINE! I can write a better story than Tolkien, gollum!
Anyway, I think something like that happens whenever a great story gets into the hands of a bunch of egotistical movie makers and Hollywood types.
I have to admit I'd love to see Cryptonomicon, Ringworld, A Fire Upon The Deep, Neuromancer, and dozens of other stories as movies, but only if they were done right.
But the lesson from The Lord Of The Rings is that will never happen.
Each of those great stories would be shortened, condensed, sliced, diced, and rewritten. The dialog would be altered, plotlines scrambled, characters changed, motives lost, and connections cut. Gratuituous romance, special effects, sex, and lowbrow humor would be added in an attempt to put back what had been lost from the cuts.
By the time it makes it to the screen, it's a ruined wreck, and anyone who loves the original story can only weep for what has been lost.
Better to just read the book again and let the movie play out inside my imagination.
Yes, Ken Thompson really did that. And yes, even though the GNU system is written from scratch, gcc could theoretically have a built-in trojan like that.
To be specific, gcc could detect when it was compiling OpenSSH (for instance) and insert code that would put a back door into OpenSSH. And gcc would also detect when it was compiling any version of itself, so that it could put into the new gcc the code for detecting if it's compiling OpenSSH (or itself) and inserting the trojan code.
And if all that was done, you could take the original trojan code out of the visible gcc source code, but the trojan would stay in.
However, I'm not worried about this, since gcc can and often is compiled by OTHER C compilers. And in fact, it often is. So if you are super-paranoid, do this:
Start with something like an old version of Solaris. Use the system compiler to compile yourself a fresh installation of a nice new gcc from sources which you have checked for back doors.
Then you can almost certainly trust the resulting gcc, since it would be very very hard for the old Solaris C compiler to recognize that it was compiling a gcc compiler (which didn't exist when the Solaris compiler was created) and put in a trojan.
So now you can compile all the rest of your open-source system with your trusted gcc and be happy.
(Since gcc works just fine as a cross-compiler, you can bootstrap yourself onto a Intel/Linux box from a Solaris machine. It's a lot of work though.)
I play bass and I've got a POD Pro that I've been really happy with.
One of the neat things about it is that when you select an amp model, the bass, treble, drive, and other controls on the POD behave the way those controls would on the real amp.
Without having played through all of the different amps and cabinets that the POD emulates, it's hard for me to say how accurate all the emulations are. But the SWR model does sound a lot like my SWR amp, and the Ampeg model definitely seems to have the SVT feel to it.
The manual has an interesting description of all the different amps and cabinets that they modeled, along with some history of the companies and designers that produced them, and some of the well known bands and recordings that used them.
The SPDIF out (on the Pro model) and all the other in and out connections are really useful. If you play bass or guitar you should check one out.
What are you talking about?
I call BS on your silly assertion that "biological system's don't have free gasses floating around."
On the contrary, your cells are full of oxygen dissolved in water. Or don't you breathe? You also have carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and all sorts of other gases from air dissolved in your body.
(The dissolved nitrogen is what causes the bends when divers come up too fast.)
Something like: The United States ends up being good at only four things:
That may turn out to be one of the famous predictions of Science Fiction, like Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of communications satellites.