Technically, yes, it seems they broke the law. But many people think that what my.mp3.com did with their Beam-It app should not be illegal.The law is wrong. Distributing copyrighted material to people that have already paid for the copyrighed material should not be illegal.
I think that MP3.com was trying to be an honest business, but the IP laws in this country are so screwed up that they made an honest mistake.
That error_reporting() call is what I want, and, it looks like it's in PHP3 as well. Doh! If I had known that a month ago, I would have saved a lot of debugging time. That is the kind of information that should be front and center in all PHP documentation.
I've been doing a lot of PHP programming over the last two months. Before that I had a lot of experience programming in C++. I think PHP is great. I'm really looking forward to using PHP 4, with the optimizers and precompilers.
I mostly use the online documentation, but I've got the pocket reference by Rasmus Lerdorf. It's pretty helpful once you know the basics, but you probably wouldn't want to learn PHP from it.
One thing that I would like to see covered in the books is PHPLIB. I used PHPLIB for my last project, and man, does that stuff rock! It has very useful code for sessions, authorization, database access, query and table widgets, and more.
You see, one of the problems with doing a nice web app is that HTTP is a stateless protocol - the server gets a series of requests, but doesn't track the flow of the user from one page to another. PHPLIB fixes this with sessions: as long as the user is on the site, they have a unique session ID. Even better, session variables can easily be stored from one page view to the next, and this is nearly automatic. It allows you to forget that HTTP is stateless!
The object oriented design of PHPLIB is pretty good too - I've subclassed the table and query widgets without too much trouble, although PHP has some limitations with inheritance that are a little annoying. (A subclass that overrides a method can't call the implementation of that method in the base class - or at least I don't know any way to do it.)
My only major complaint with PHP is that variables are created implicitly. This is convenient for small scripts, but sucks for complicated applications, since typos in variable names don't cause parsing errors, they just get created as empty variables. On a related note, global variables have to be declared as global inside functions. If you forget, you just get another empty local variable. Similarly, member variables of objects must be referred to as $this-> somevar in methods. That's fine, but if you forget - whoops, no error message, just another new, empty variable.
I'm hoping PHP4 will have an option for requiring explicit variable declarations. That would make PHP nearly perfect.
I believe that what the MPAA is worried about here is digital cable.
They want to make sure that people with digital cable cannot record movies digitally, remove the ads, and start swapping them over the internet.
There would be no loss of quality due to analog - the quality of the MPEG 2 compression of digital cable would be preserved. These files are not impossibly big either - typically, digital cable is not quite as high quality as DVD - a 2 GB file can hold an entire movie at quality considerably higher than VHS.
There is no need for further lossy compression - MPEG 2 is already lossy compression. TiVo is different - they take analog inputs, digitize them, and compress them to the hard drive in a proprietary format.
I agree that ultimately, power comes from the barrel of a gun. But in today's world, the rich, privileged, and powerful who hold most of the powerful positions in governments overlap a lot with the people who own and run very large corporations.
So, while I agree that nation states are not going away, I think that we will increasingly see them acting in the interests of large corporations. This is really nothing new - the United States in particular has often used its military power in the interests of rich companies.
We may eventually see large companies "buying" small countries just to gain more overt political and military power. For example, Microsoft (everyone's favorite example of a big bad company) could buy some small island state simply by providing each resident with free unlimited education, health care, and work. In return, they would get to run the government. They could change the name of the country to Microsoft, and then they would have a seat at the UN and could start legally creating their own military forces and legal systems.
Admittedly, this seems pretty ridiculous right now. But perhaps, after a couple more decades of corporations becoming ever more powerful and governments becoming ever less relevant, we might start to see weirdness like that happening.
(Imagine the EULA: This agreement with Microsoft, Inc. will be governed by the laws of the state of Microsoft... I bet Bill Gates has had daydreams like that.)
In the end, wars between corporate-controlled countries could be "competition by other means" - not really that far from the wars of lawsuits we get now.
Java has nothing to do with Javascript. Disabling Java does not disable Javascript.
And I think you missed something I said about right clicking: The Javascript event handler for right click overrides the context menu, so you can't even get the URL that way. Now, of course you can view source for the frameset, copy the frame link out of that, paste it into your browser, and then view source on THAT, but if the web site maintainer really wanted to be a jerk they can work around that too. How - well, more javascript to ensure the document is in subframe it should be, or one-time URLS with unique id's in them, or whatever... And the more complicated it gets to actually view the source, the more likely that the web site owner would be able to convince a neanderthal judge that you have bypassed their "content protection system" and are guilty under the DMCA. It sounds crazy, but at the rate the US is sliding into corporate socialism I would bet this will happen within 2 years.
...just going to fill things up even further with people fighting anti-patents...
What's to fight with an antipatent? It sounds to me like it's just a dated, formal declaration that "I thought of this idea (method and apparatus in patent-speak) on September 1, 2000, and hereby publically announce it to the world. It might be useful for (this), (that) and (other thing) or similar purposes.".
The only point of doing it is that it would be impossible for anyone to patent it afterwards - it just proves prior art. There would hardly be any administration neccessary - just a big on-line database, with on-line submission, digital signatures, etc. Then patent examiners can search it, and everyone else can submit to it.
I've seen web pages that use Javascript to catch the right mouse click button and pop up a little window saying "This is copyrighted". So you can't use the View Source context menu on the frame. And the browser menu won't help, because the site is using frames and all of the interesting content is in the frame, not the container document which just has a frameset.
Of course you can get around all that if you try... but just wait until somebody gets sued under the DMCA for this.
(offtopic: but does anyone know how to turn off Javascript in Internet Explorer 5.0? Did you know that if you search for Javascript in IE5.0 help you get no matches!?)
The obvious answer to this is that Red Hat and/or some of the other big companies in the Linux arena should make a POSIX-compatible, DII/COE compliant version of Linux, and distribute it on CD-ROMs that do not contain any source code for the included software. Furthermore, each binary should be digitally signed and the signatures stored on the CDROM, with a little executable on the CDROM that would check each binary on the system for changes.
That system would be demonstrably more secure from tampering than Windows NT or any supposedly acceptable OS they use. And that would be the end of this "Open Source is Insecure" FUD crap.
Red Hat, where are you? Please make this happen just so people don't have to discuss it anymore. (Oh yeah - of course the source code would be available... separately.)
It has a 20 stage pipeline instead of 10 stage, a 400 MHz system bus instead of 133 Mhz, SSE2 with 144 new instructions, an "advanced transfer cache", and other changes.
There's an article describing some of the differences here.
On the other hand the PIII 1.13 GHz really is just an overclocked PIII 1 Ghz. That's probably the source of your confusion.
That takes me back... In 1990 I spent 5 grand on a 386 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. It had a 2400 baud modem. I joined a local bulletin board system and had one hour access a day. It cost me a little less than my DSL does now. If I was quick, I could download about one megabyte in that one hour. Telix was the terminal program of the gods - it had ZModem downloads with the ability to resume broken downloads.
A few years later I spent 300 dollars on the Sound Blaster Pro when it came out - it was the first stereo sound card, but was only 8-bit. In 1994 I installed Linux.
Kids these days - you don't know how lucky you are.
</old_guy_voice>
If they are selling the hardware at a loss, and make back the money on the games, you would think that they would be thrilled to have people using emulators. Those people will just buy the profitable games and skip the loss-leader consoles.
So what's the problem? They would make even more money.
I expect that sometime not long after the PlayStation 2 comes out, a high-end PC with the latest and greatest video card would be able to emulate it. So, Sony had better plan to make the money on the games and not the console.
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible?
Well, I don't think so. First, there are known standards for freedom and openness - take Debian's guidelines, for example, or the Open Source Initiative you mentioned. The License Wars have left most people a little shell shocked though, so I suspect most people just want stuff to be under one of the well known licenses.
More interesting is the idea of assuring the quality of open source software.
Certainly, nothing's stopping them from taking some particular distribution(s) and doing really extensive testing with them. They can audit the source code, just like the OpenBSD people have. They can publish MD5 checksums of "approved" binaries, together with the sources. That will let users ensure they have the "approved" software, if that's what they want.
Then they can state with confidence that their hardware and software works with it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but hopefully they will be "open" enough to work with several significant distributions, including Debian. If they do a good job, and are seen to be helping the community (finding and fixing bugs and contributing the fixes back to the maintainers of the projects) I'm sure that they will earn the respect of the Linux community (such as it is).
This will be useful for big companies - and that's probably the target audience of this effort. Also, they could produce a Posix-compliant distribution of Linux, which might be helpful for government work. From what I hear this is mostly a matter of applying a bunch of patches (and then testing, of course).
At the very least, this will help deal with the style of FUD that "open source is dangerous because anyone could modify it! You wouldn't know what's running on your computer!"
nVidia has some of the absolute worst driver writers I have ever run across. They never got around to supporting multithreaded TNT applications (that is, you can't have multiple threads in an application that uses the TNT, even if only one of those threads makes graphics calls).
I think you should explain what you mean a little better, because what you said is obviously wrong.
Internet Explorer 5.0 is a multithreaded application and it works just fine on my Diamond Viper with a TNT chip. No surprise there. Did you mean 3D games? Or dual processors? Well, Quake III supports dual processors, using two rendering threads, and works just fine on TNT up to GeForce2, in Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Linux. I recently upgraded from the Detonator 2 driver to the Detonator 3 on my Windows 2000 and the installation was very simple. It used the standard Windows 2000 method - open up the adaptor properties page from the control panel, and click the "Update Driver" button. I don't know how you possibly could "get it wrong".
Despite NVidia playing nasty with patents now, for 3D games their cards are generally acknowleged to be the best. Don't believe me, just go read a dozen of the gamer-oriented hardware review sites.
Really, though, there are some huge opportunities here. If the us government just opened up the following [x].us domains:
for.us, with.us, like.us, love.us, r.us, are.us
and auctioned off each of the attractive subdomains (work.for.us, etc.) they could make a ton of money for wiring schools to the internet, or paying teachers, or something worthwhile.
I disagree. This kind of service CAN be sustained without any kind of commercial venture. After all, providing CD and track titles is a lot less bandwidth intensive than providing the whole music track, but Napster and Gnutella manage to do that pretty well.
In fact, a distributed database / index should be built into Freenet, Gnutella, Napster, and other similar services. It's an obvious thing, so I think eventually it will be.
That way, you don't put the whole load on one person's home DSL, you spread it out over thousands of people with DSL.
If you're not willing to bend over backwards to satisfy your consumers, they're going to find other places that will. Believe me, they're out there - any successful business owner will tell you that 90% of the success is due to good customer service.
That is true for many customers. But not me. I prefer to do my own research, and then choose and purchase quality components, with manufacturers warranties, from a store with rock bottom prices and no tech support or customer service whatsoever.
Most tech support and customer service from "computer stores" is crap anyway. Why would I want to pay extra for the privilege of calling up a manufacturer only to have them tell me that they don't know anything about getting the 2.4 kernel running on their hardware, and what is the 2.4 kernel anyway?
Basically, I want to buy stuff from a warehouse. And I'll bet there's a lot of people reading slashdot that feel the same way.
And how will the CPU communicate with the ``shared'' memory if you're not using either a serial or a parallel interface?
Um. Oops, good point. I should have said serial or parallel bus, not interface. But you've still got me...
Yes, the graphics card and CPU both need to access all that memory one way or another. But look at how graphics cards do it - private interfaces, often to high speed DDR - DRAM over 256-bit wide pathways. They have huge bandwidth.
So, one option is to stop using buses and use a point-to-point system. I think some of the Athelon and DEC Alpha systems already use this: the CPU has a dedicated private pathway to the memory, and so does the video card, and so does the chipset which provides the PCI bus and other interfaces in the system.
Anyway... yes, you are right, both the CPU and the graphics processor will need some sort of connection to the hypothetical shared memory, and it would have to be extremely fast. The graphics processor would probably need a cache, just like the CPU. Given that, it might be better just to give up the shared memory idea altogether, use AGP 8X and texture compression, and design applications to deal with it and work around the problems.
Sigh.
Idea for a slashdot interview: John Carmack on video card architechture! Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Actually, I think the opposite might happen - eventually, all graphics interfaces will use shared memory with the CPU. Neither serial or parallel interfaces will be fast enough in the long run.
There's a big problem with using a purely serial interface to the video card. For really good 3D graphics, the serial interface would need to be horrifically fast, or you would need an awful lot of RAM on the video card.
Most games will run in 16 MB or less of video RAM for textures, but this is using fairly low-res / small textures. I play a lot of 3D games, and they all have the same visual problems: lighting and shading anomalies, low resolution textures tiled over surfaces, and low polygon counts. These are some of the main problems preventing current 3D games from looking "real". John Carmack and the other gods of 3D programming do a lot of work to get around these problems and disguise them, but it would be better to just fix them.
The use of really high resolution textures would make games look dramatically better, but is difficult or impossible with current video cards. A single high resolution, 24-bit texture, covering a wall or floor for instance, might easily be over 1 MB. And a typical 3D game needs dozens of textures all at once.
For example, assume that you are running a game at 60 frames per second. Suppose your screen resolution is 1280 x 1024. Then for really realistic graphics in a big outdoor area you might want to have about 32 high-res (1024x1024), 24-bit static textures. That's 96 MB right there. Add in some mip-mapped downsampled versions and it's at least 128 MB.
Suppose you've "only" got 64MB of RAM on your video card. For a really rough approximation, you will have to transfer about 64MB of textures through your bus, 60 times a second. Do the math - it's 30 gigabits per second. I'm no hardware engineer, but I don't think it's that easy to even make silicon that switches at 30 gigahertz, and that's what you would need for a serial bus.
Even AGP 4x only manages 8 gigabits per second, and it's a parallel bus.
Even if you have enough texture RAM on the video card, many games use procedurally generated textures, usually for things like water, fire, and other effects. These change every frame, and look dramatically better than a simple repeating loop. Unfortunately, procedurally generated textures must be uploaded to the video card every frame. Even one high-res procedural texture could suck up 500 Mbps of bandwidth.
Hardware supported texture compression helps a lot, but can't completely solve the problem.
Really, I think the best thing for high speed graphics would be for the video card and the CPU to just share a big whack of high-speed DDR-DRAM. Interestingly enough, this is the approach that Microsoft's X-Box is taking.
Using shared memory between the CPU and the video card would also make it much easier to experiment with more esoteric forms of 3D graphics generation, like hardware support for voxels.
That could lead to some gaming breakthroughs. I'm getting tired of 3D games with worlds built out of perfectly flat triangles and rectangles with blurry textures plastered across them.
I don't think the presence of life on other planets would be a problem for creationists - at least not thoughtful creationists. (And yes, there are some, not all creationists are redneck anti-science ignoramuses, etc.)
In fact, C.S. Lewis, originally an athiest who became one of the most famous Christian authors of the last century, also wrote a little bit of science fiction. Besides that, he wrote an essay on the subject of what it would mean to Christianity to find life on other planets. Basically, it wouldn't be a big deal from a theological perspective, although it would be incredible scientific discovery. After all, if you are willing to believe God created life on earth, why wouldn't He create it other places as well? Most of the essay actually considers the potential Christian responsibility to meeting intelligent aliens - what if they have a different religion, or no religion, or are morally perfect and don't need Christianity, or totally evil.
An interesting essay, at least for Christian-type nerds.
First of all, at least with Free software it is possible to audit the source, whereas with proprietary software, it probably isn't. That's advantage #1.
Now, of course most users don't have the time or technical knowlege to audit source code themselves. So? The point is, as long as some people do, and if, as a responsible system administrator, you keep track of what they find, you get the benefit of their work. With Free software, many, many people have the source and some of them will audit it.
On the other hand, makers of proprietary software don't usually search for and correct security problems until they have already been found, and often exploited. Very few people have the source so it is unlikely to be audited. That's advantage #2.
Even better, a bunch of companies and/or government departments could form a consortium to fund auditing, and all share the results. With proprietary code, that would be extrely difficult. For example, I'm sure that the US Navy has access to the Windows NT source code, but so what? As you point out, they may not have the time or expertise to really audit it. And even worse, they can't easily form a community group to support auditing, because everyone would have to have access to the source, and Microsoft just isn't going to let that happen. Advantage #3 for Free software.
Finally... you claim that Linux is riddled with major security problems. Well - that's a questionable assertion. Furthermore, it is common knowlege that NT is worse, despite the fact that Linux ships with far, far more capabilities than NT does. Don't believe me - just check BugTraq. But don't make the mistake that Fred Moody did a couple of weeks ago, and add up the numbers wrong. That would be really embarassing.
Yup. With the latest release of Debian, and hearing so much about the godlike powers of the packaging tools, I had decided that my installation of Linux on my main home machine would be Debian. The ideologican purity is a good thing (to me) as well.
But I like to play on the cutting edge - a "QA" version of Debian would be perfect.
I listen to NPR on the way to work and home, because the short little "this program brought to you by FooCompany, makers of business to business software" is WAY, WAY less irritating than the advertising on other channels. And they have interesting stuff - I've bought CD's from musicians I've heard on NPR, and found out interesting stuff about the recent party conventions.
The critical thing about on-line news is I can quickly scan the headlines, ignore the ads, and only read the stuff I care about.
When you get used to that, watching news on TV is just intolerable, both for the astoundingly stupid and annoying ads that make you wait until they end, and even more importantly, the lack of a fast forward button to skip the retarded "human interest" stories that are irrelevent filler.
Watching TV news is like watching a stupid person web surfing. It's painful.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that MP3.com was trying to be an honest business, but the IP laws in this country are so screwed up that they made an honest mistake.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Hey, thanks for the info!
That error_reporting() call is what I want, and, it looks like it's in PHP3 as well. Doh! If I had known that a month ago, I would have saved a lot of debugging time. That is the kind of information that should be front and center in all PHP documentation.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I've been doing a lot of PHP programming over the last two months. Before that I had a lot of experience programming in C++. I think PHP is great. I'm really looking forward to using PHP 4, with the optimizers and precompilers.
I mostly use the online documentation, but I've got the pocket reference by Rasmus Lerdorf. It's pretty helpful once you know the basics, but you probably wouldn't want to learn PHP from it.
One thing that I would like to see covered in the books is PHPLIB. I used PHPLIB for my last project, and man, does that stuff rock! It has very useful code for sessions, authorization, database access, query and table widgets, and more.
You see, one of the problems with doing a nice web app is that HTTP is a stateless protocol - the server gets a series of requests, but doesn't track the flow of the user from one page to another. PHPLIB fixes this with sessions: as long as the user is on the site, they have a unique session ID. Even better, session variables can easily be stored from one page view to the next, and this is nearly automatic. It allows you to forget that HTTP is stateless!
The object oriented design of PHPLIB is pretty good too - I've subclassed the table and query widgets without too much trouble, although PHP has some limitations with inheritance that are a little annoying. (A subclass that overrides a method can't call the implementation of that method in the base class - or at least I don't know any way to do it.)
My only major complaint with PHP is that variables are created implicitly. This is convenient for small scripts, but sucks for complicated applications, since typos in variable names don't cause parsing errors, they just get created as empty variables. On a related note, global variables have to be declared as global inside functions. If you forget, you just get another empty local variable. Similarly, member variables of objects must be referred to as $this-> somevar in methods. That's fine, but if you forget - whoops, no error message, just another new, empty variable.
I'm hoping PHP4 will have an option for requiring explicit variable declarations. That would make PHP nearly perfect.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I believe that what the MPAA is worried about here is digital cable.
They want to make sure that people with digital cable cannot record movies digitally, remove the ads, and start swapping them over the internet.
There would be no loss of quality due to analog - the quality of the MPEG 2 compression of digital cable would be preserved. These files are not impossibly big either - typically, digital cable is not quite as high quality as DVD - a 2 GB file can hold an entire movie at quality considerably higher than VHS.
There is no need for further lossy compression - MPEG 2 is already lossy compression. TiVo is different - they take analog inputs, digitize them, and compress them to the hard drive in a proprietary format.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree that ultimately, power comes from the barrel of a gun. But in today's world, the rich, privileged, and powerful who hold most of the powerful positions in governments overlap a lot with the people who own and run very large corporations.
So, while I agree that nation states are not going away, I think that we will increasingly see them acting in the interests of large corporations. This is really nothing new - the United States in particular has often used its military power in the interests of rich companies.
We may eventually see large companies "buying" small countries just to gain more overt political and military power. For example, Microsoft (everyone's favorite example of a big bad company) could buy some small island state simply by providing each resident with free unlimited education, health care, and work. In return, they would get to run the government. They could change the name of the country to Microsoft, and then they would have a seat at the UN and could start legally creating their own military forces and legal systems.
Admittedly, this seems pretty ridiculous right now. But perhaps, after a couple more decades of corporations becoming ever more powerful and governments becoming ever less relevant, we might start to see weirdness like that happening.
(Imagine the EULA: This agreement with Microsoft, Inc. will be governed by the laws of the state of Microsoft... I bet Bill Gates has had daydreams like that.)
In the end, wars between corporate-controlled countries could be "competition by other means" - not really that far from the wars of lawsuits we get now.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Bzzt. Sorry. Thanks for trying to help, though.
Java has nothing to do with Javascript. Disabling Java does not disable Javascript.
And I think you missed something I said about right clicking: The Javascript event handler for right click overrides the context menu, so you can't even get the URL that way. Now, of course you can view source for the frameset, copy the frame link out of that, paste it into your browser, and then view source on THAT, but if the web site maintainer really wanted to be a jerk they can work around that too. How - well, more javascript to ensure the document is in subframe it should be, or one-time URLS with unique id's in them, or whatever... And the more complicated it gets to actually view the source, the more likely that the web site owner would be able to convince a neanderthal judge that you have bypassed their "content protection system" and are guilty under the DMCA. It sounds crazy, but at the rate the US is sliding into corporate socialism I would bet this will happen within 2 years.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The only point of doing it is that it would be impossible for anyone to patent it afterwards - it just proves prior art. There would hardly be any administration neccessary - just a big on-line database, with on-line submission, digital signatures, etc. Then patent examiners can search it, and everyone else can submit to it.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Don't laugh!
I've seen web pages that use Javascript to catch the right mouse click button and pop up a little window saying "This is copyrighted". So you can't use the View Source context menu on the frame. And the browser menu won't help, because the site is using frames and all of the interesting content is in the frame, not the container document which just has a frameset.
Of course you can get around all that if you try... but just wait until somebody gets sued under the DMCA for this.
(offtopic: but does anyone know how to turn off Javascript in Internet Explorer 5.0? Did you know that if you search for Javascript in IE5.0 help you get no matches!?)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The obvious answer to this is that Red Hat and/or some of the other big companies in the Linux arena should make a POSIX-compatible, DII/COE compliant version of Linux, and distribute it on CD-ROMs that do not contain any source code for the included software. Furthermore, each binary should be digitally signed and the signatures stored on the CDROM, with a little executable on the CDROM that would check each binary on the system for changes.
That system would be demonstrably more secure from tampering than Windows NT or any supposedly acceptable OS they use. And that would be the end of this "Open Source is Insecure" FUD crap.
Red Hat, where are you? Please make this happen just so people don't have to discuss it anymore. (Oh yeah - of course the source code would be available... separately.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
A Pentium IV is not the same as a Pentium III.
It has a 20 stage pipeline instead of 10 stage, a 400 MHz system bus instead of 133 Mhz, SSE2 with 144 new instructions, an "advanced transfer cache", and other changes.
There's an article describing some of the differences here.
On the other hand the PIII 1.13 GHz really is just an overclocked PIII 1 Ghz. That's probably the source of your confusion.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
< old_guy_voice >
That takes me back... In 1990 I spent 5 grand on a 386 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive. It had a 2400 baud modem. I joined a local bulletin board system and had one hour access a day. It cost me a little less than my DSL does now. If I was quick, I could download about one megabyte in that one hour. Telix was the terminal program of the gods - it had ZModem downloads with the ability to resume broken downloads.
A few years later I spent 300 dollars on the Sound Blaster Pro when it came out - it was the first stereo sound card, but was only 8-bit. In 1994 I installed Linux.
Kids these days - you don't know how lucky you are.
</old_guy_voice>
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If they are selling the hardware at a loss, and make back the money on the games, you would think that they would be thrilled to have people using emulators. Those people will just buy the profitable games and skip the loss-leader consoles.
So what's the problem? They would make even more money.
I expect that sometime not long after the PlayStation 2 comes out, a high-end PC with the latest and greatest video card would be able to emulate it. So, Sony had better plan to make the money on the games and not the console.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible?
Well, I don't think so. First, there are known standards for freedom and openness - take Debian's guidelines, for example, or the Open Source Initiative you mentioned. The License Wars have left most people a little shell shocked though, so I suspect most people just want stuff to be under one of the well known licenses.
More interesting is the idea of assuring the quality of open source software.
Certainly, nothing's stopping them from taking some particular distribution(s) and doing really extensive testing with them. They can audit the source code, just like the OpenBSD people have. They can publish MD5 checksums of "approved" binaries, together with the sources. That will let users ensure they have the "approved" software, if that's what they want.
Then they can state with confidence that their hardware and software works with it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but hopefully they will be "open" enough to work with several significant distributions, including Debian. If they do a good job, and are seen to be helping the community (finding and fixing bugs and contributing the fixes back to the maintainers of the projects) I'm sure that they will earn the respect of the Linux community (such as it is).
This will be useful for big companies - and that's probably the target audience of this effort. Also, they could produce a Posix-compliant distribution of Linux, which might be helpful for government work. From what I hear this is mostly a matter of applying a bunch of patches (and then testing, of course).
At the very least, this will help deal with the style of FUD that "open source is dangerous because anyone could modify it! You wouldn't know what's running on your computer!"
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Slashdot post, 2000 AD:CD ROM, 52001 AD:
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Internet Explorer 5.0 is a multithreaded application and it works just fine on my Diamond Viper with a TNT chip. No surprise there. Did you mean 3D games? Or dual processors? Well, Quake III supports dual processors, using two rendering threads, and works just fine on TNT up to GeForce2, in Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Linux. I recently upgraded from the Detonator 2 driver to the Detonator 3 on my Windows 2000 and the installation was very simple. It used the standard Windows 2000 method - open up the adaptor properties page from the control panel, and click the "Update Driver" button. I don't know how you possibly could "get it wrong".
Despite NVidia playing nasty with patents now, for 3D games their cards are generally acknowleged to be the best. Don't believe me, just go read a dozen of the gamer-oriented hardware review sites.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Once you get going it's hard to stop.
this.is.us
have.fun.with.us (*cough*)
fly.with.us, shop.with.us, play.with.us, pray.with.us, verb.with.us
for.us.or.against.us
work.for.us, pay.for.us, pray.for.us
bill.gates.loves.us, cops.love.us, everybody.likes.us
we.dont.like.the.drugs.but.the.drugs.like.us
Really, though, there are some huge opportunities here. If the us government just opened up the following [x].us domains:
for.us, with.us, like.us, love.us, r.us, are.us
and auctioned off each of the attractive subdomains (work.for.us, etc.) they could make a ton of money for wiring schools to the internet, or paying teachers, or something worthwhile.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
More interesting possible us domains
toys.r.us
computers.r.us
domains.r.us
whatever.r.us
travel.to.us
follow.us, try.us, view.us, hear.us, smell.us, taste.us, feel.us
silly.us !
avoid.us
stay.away.from.us
just.shoot.us
why.us, not.us, why.not.us
know.us, visit.us, fsck.us, love.us, annoy.us, hate.us, leave.us
miss.us (missus... get it? Like Missus Robinson)
dont.tread.on.us
dont.stand.so.close.to.us
catch.the.b.us
we.have.met.the.enemy.and.they.are.us
Ok. I'm done now.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I disagree. This kind of service CAN be sustained without any kind of commercial venture. After all, providing CD and track titles is a lot less bandwidth intensive than providing the whole music track, but Napster and Gnutella manage to do that pretty well.
In fact, a distributed database / index should be built into Freenet, Gnutella, Napster, and other similar services. It's an obvious thing, so I think eventually it will be.
That way, you don't put the whole load on one person's home DSL, you spread it out over thousands of people with DSL.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Most tech support and customer service from "computer stores" is crap anyway. Why would I want to pay extra for the privilege of calling up a manufacturer only to have them tell me that they don't know anything about getting the 2.4 kernel running on their hardware, and what is the 2.4 kernel anyway?
Basically, I want to buy stuff from a warehouse. And I'll bet there's a lot of people reading slashdot that feel the same way.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yes, the graphics card and CPU both need to access all that memory one way or another. But look at how graphics cards do it - private interfaces, often to high speed DDR - DRAM over 256-bit wide pathways. They have huge bandwidth.
So, one option is to stop using buses and use a point-to-point system. I think some of the Athelon and DEC Alpha systems already use this: the CPU has a dedicated private pathway to the memory, and so does the video card, and so does the chipset which provides the PCI bus and other interfaces in the system.
Anyway... yes, you are right, both the CPU and the graphics processor will need some sort of connection to the hypothetical shared memory, and it would have to be extremely fast. The graphics processor would probably need a cache, just like the CPU. Given that, it might be better just to give up the shared memory idea altogether, use AGP 8X and texture compression, and design applications to deal with it and work around the problems.
Sigh.
Idea for a slashdot interview: John Carmack on video card architechture!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Actually, I think the opposite might happen - eventually, all graphics interfaces will use shared memory with the CPU. Neither serial or parallel interfaces will be fast enough in the long run.
There's a big problem with using a purely serial interface to the video card. For really good 3D graphics, the serial interface would need to be horrifically fast, or you would need an awful lot of RAM on the video card.
Most games will run in 16 MB or less of video RAM for textures, but this is using fairly low-res / small textures. I play a lot of 3D games, and they all have the same visual problems: lighting and shading anomalies, low resolution textures tiled over surfaces, and low polygon counts. These are some of the main problems preventing current 3D games from looking "real". John Carmack and the other gods of 3D programming do a lot of work to get around these problems and disguise them, but it would be better to just fix them.
The use of really high resolution textures would make games look dramatically better, but is difficult or impossible with current video cards. A single high resolution, 24-bit texture, covering a wall or floor for instance, might easily be over 1 MB. And a typical 3D game needs dozens of textures all at once.
For example, assume that you are running a game at 60 frames per second. Suppose your screen resolution is 1280 x 1024. Then for really realistic graphics in a big outdoor area you might want to have about 32 high-res (1024x1024), 24-bit static textures. That's 96 MB right there. Add in some mip-mapped downsampled versions and it's at least 128 MB.
Suppose you've "only" got 64MB of RAM on your video card. For a really rough approximation, you will have to transfer about 64MB of textures through your bus, 60 times a second. Do the math - it's 30 gigabits per second. I'm no hardware engineer, but I don't think it's that easy to even make silicon that switches at 30 gigahertz, and that's what you would need for a serial bus.
Even AGP 4x only manages 8 gigabits per second, and it's a parallel bus.
Even if you have enough texture RAM on the video card, many games use procedurally generated textures, usually for things like water, fire, and other effects. These change every frame, and look dramatically better than a simple repeating loop. Unfortunately, procedurally generated textures must be uploaded to the video card every frame. Even one high-res procedural texture could suck up 500 Mbps of bandwidth.
Hardware supported texture compression helps a lot, but can't completely solve the problem.
Really, I think the best thing for high speed graphics would be for the video card and the CPU to just share a big whack of high-speed DDR-DRAM. Interestingly enough, this is the approach that Microsoft's X-Box is taking.
Using shared memory between the CPU and the video card would also make it much easier to experiment with more esoteric forms of 3D graphics generation, like hardware support for voxels.
That could lead to some gaming breakthroughs. I'm getting tired of 3D games with worlds built out of perfectly flat triangles and rectangles with blurry textures plastered across them.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I don't think the presence of life on other planets would be a problem for creationists - at least not thoughtful creationists. (And yes, there are some, not all creationists are redneck anti-science ignoramuses, etc.)
In fact, C.S. Lewis, originally an athiest who became one of the most famous Christian authors of the last century, also wrote a little bit of science fiction. Besides that, he wrote an essay on the subject of what it would mean to Christianity to find life on other planets. Basically, it wouldn't be a big deal from a theological perspective, although it would be incredible scientific discovery. After all, if you are willing to believe God created life on earth, why wouldn't He create it other places as well? Most of the essay actually considers the potential Christian responsibility to meeting intelligent aliens - what if they have a different religion, or no religion, or are morally perfect and don't need Christianity, or totally evil.
An interesting essay, at least for Christian-type nerds.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Sigh. Of course it's an advantage.
First of all, at least with Free software it is possible to audit the source, whereas with proprietary software, it probably isn't. That's advantage #1.
Now, of course most users don't have the time or technical knowlege to audit source code themselves. So? The point is, as long as some people do, and if, as a responsible system administrator, you keep track of what they find, you get the benefit of their work. With Free software, many, many people have the source and some of them will audit it.
On the other hand, makers of proprietary software don't usually search for and correct security problems until they have already been found, and often exploited. Very few people have the source so it is unlikely to be audited. That's advantage #2.
Even better, a bunch of companies and/or government departments could form a consortium to fund auditing, and all share the results. With proprietary code, that would be extrely difficult. For example, I'm sure that the US Navy has access to the Windows NT source code, but so what? As you point out, they may not have the time or expertise to really audit it. And even worse, they can't easily form a community group to support auditing, because everyone would have to have access to the source, and Microsoft just isn't going to let that happen. Advantage #3 for Free software.
Finally... you claim that Linux is riddled with major security problems. Well - that's a questionable assertion. Furthermore, it is common knowlege that NT is worse, despite the fact that Linux ships with far, far more capabilities than NT does. Don't believe me - just check BugTraq. But don't make the mistake that Fred Moody did a couple of weeks ago, and add up the numbers wrong. That would be really embarassing.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yup. With the latest release of Debian, and hearing so much about the godlike powers of the packaging tools, I had decided that my installation of Linux on my main home machine would be Debian. The ideologican purity is a good thing (to me) as well.
But I like to play on the cutting edge - a "QA" version of Debian would be perfect.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
<AOL> Me Too! </AOL>
I listen to NPR on the way to work and home, because the short little "this program brought to you by FooCompany, makers of business to business software" is WAY, WAY less irritating than the advertising on other channels. And they have interesting stuff - I've bought CD's from musicians I've heard on NPR, and found out interesting stuff about the recent party conventions.
And the rest of my news I get from the net - Slashdot, Blues News, Wired News, CBC (Canadian non-corporate news) and CNN.com.
The critical thing about on-line news is I can quickly scan the headlines, ignore the ads, and only read the stuff I care about.
When you get used to that, watching news on TV is just intolerable, both for the astoundingly stupid and annoying ads that make you wait until they end, and even more importantly, the lack of a fast forward button to skip the retarded "human interest" stories that are irrelevent filler.
Watching TV news is like watching a stupid person web surfing. It's painful.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)