Yes, I oversimplified the Mindcraft incident for the purposes of illustration. Microsoft, of course, did set up the test so that they knew they would win it. I'm sure they have their own benchmarking and polling facilities and whenever you see a Microsoft sponsored benchmark or poll that they won, you can be sure that they just paid to have some "independent" do the same thing that Microsoft already made sure they could win.
Nonetheless, the kernel developers (and of course, all the linux zealots) did at first believe that the problems were entirely due to the fact that the contest was rigged. It perhaps wasn't weeks of denial, but IIRC there were a few days.. until the Mindcraft retest, where the Linux machine was optimized as well.
IIRC, Linux 2.2.x would have had a difficult time beating NT on any similar 4-way SMP system with 4 ethernet cards, and the details of the hand optimization, RAID controllers and memory that people made a big deal about at the time turned out to be largely irrelevant.
Yup. This might end up being like the Mindcraft tests that showed NT as being faster than Linux.
After a couple weeks of denial, the developers realized there really was a problem with Linux on high end hardware and started fixing it.
This is the same thing. People will be in denial about it for a while. Maybe, if things go well, the distribution developers will realize there is a problem. It's not like theres no solutions out there... if every consumer oriented distribution followed the Linux Standard Base, and the LSB was beefed up to include a lot more details like library versions, etc. then a program that worked on one distribution would have a much better chance of working on others. That just isn't true right now.
A lot of the problem is in the way 3D accelerated graphics and sound is configured. That's probably the hardest part of setting up Linux on the desktop right now. That's due to two factors: 1, X Windows only recently came out with a decent architechture for 3D graphics, replacing the older custom hacks which mostly were 3dfx-centered. Second, the graphics card market changes very quickly, and the very popular NVidia cards dont have fully open source drivers. This inevitably leads to compatibility problems. Unfortunately Quake III got stuck right in the middle of it.
The way Quake III was sold didn't help. If the Linux and Windows versions had hit store shelves at the same time, they would have sold a lot more of the Linux ones. But most Linux-loving gamers still keep a dual-boot Windows around for gaming and were not willing to wait for the Linux packages.
The situation can and will get better though. Hopefully, by June next year all the major distributions will be based on Linux 2.4, XFree86 4.0.1, and will have setup programs that actually work for 3D graphics. Hopefully libraries will become better standardized. KDE 2 and the next release of Gnome will probably bring a larger population of people who actually use Linux on the desktop without dual booting. Those people will want games.
Well, I would agree that the article was painfully short on details. But I don't neccessarily think it was crap. Here's how I think they think it would work (reading between the lines).
1. The earth has a big magnetic field.
2. We can easily create big electromagnets with symmetrical magnetic fields.
3. Since the magnetic fields are symmetric, we can't use them for propulsion, or we would all be flying around in magnetically propelled cars already.
4. This potential new discovery of an asymmetric magnetic field gets around the problem of #3 by letting us build an asymmetrical magnetic field that will push against the earth's magnetic field, thereby producing propulsion.
5. They have to switch it on and off super fast to keep the field asymmetric.
Personally, I suspect that when the magnetic field collapses it will push in the opposite direction, thereby negating the effect. But maybe if you spin the magnet so it points the opposite direction when you turn it off...
I hope that somebody with a really strong understanding (like, a PHd grad student) of electromagnetic fields posts a big explanation in here somewhere.
And I'll say it again: Are you sure the margins are thin? Do you have some evidence of that? I suspect the margins are not that bad.
I talked to one of the buyers today at work and he told me the price on the wide-format HP color printer we use. It's horrendously expensive, even though the technology is the same as their better consumer level inkjets - it uses the same ink cartridges, but the print head moves 4 feet instead of 9 inches. There is obviously a large margin on the high-end stuff. And the markup on those ink cartridges is huge too.
It's just like Intel - there's little margin on Celerons, but they make the money on the high end Xeon chips which only a little more to manufacture.
If printing is that important to you, you're nuts to even bother with linux. Its a no-brainer that you're using win2k if you absolutely have to commit to paper.
You are seriously out of touch with how real people work. People like you have been saying for 10 years that the paperless office would happen "any day now". Meanwhile, the real world prints tens of thousands of pages a day.
Personally, I only ever print receipts from on line shopping. But I'm surrounded by people at work who print everything. Printing is essential to most people who use computers. Why do you think people bought them all? Word processing started this whole revolution. If the computer can't print, it's useless for them.
You may be right that there's no margins. I don't know - I suspect there's pretty hefty markup on those monster network laser printers and large-format color printers that sit in the corners of a million offices in the country.
I think Linus does it by occasionally smacking people. For instance, on the Linux Kernel mailing list today, in the middle of a very technical discussion of how to fix a problem that was causing file system corruption, he posted:
...
Are you all on drugs?
...
Get your acts together, guys. Stop blathering and frothing at the mouth.
...
This may sound really harsh taken out of context - in context I get the impression he was a little annoyed but still smiling.
I'm not sure how much he does it on purpose and how much is just his personality, but he keeps a pretty tight grip on the overall direction of the kernel, mostly by understanding the code better than anyone else.
I agree - in fact, I would be willing to bet $100 bucks that if they actually make this decision, they will change their minds and reverse it within 5 years. In less than 3 years it will be obvious to everyone that it was the wrong thing to do.
Why? Two related reasons. First: Soon, TV will commonly delivered over IP. The lines between TV and the Internet are going to start blurring. Next generation set top boxes that pull MPEG-2 video straight off IP multicast over DSL and cablemodems are already out there, making money.
That will enable stage 2: a world where there will be services like Napster for TV - imagine being able to access a gigantic on line library of TV content - watch any episode of X-Files or the Simpsons, whenever you want!
And it will be legal, but probably not free. For example, I quit watching TV two years ago. I can't stand the ads, and having watch my favorite shows only when the network decides they should be scheduled. Everyone who is used to the web will want TV to be the same - A flat fee for access, and then watch what you want, when you want. (TIVO is a step in the right direction).
The IOC thinks they will get more money by locking out competition to the current broadcasters. How foolish!
Soon, the broadcasters with the money will be the ones that provide people with exactly what they want. The world the IOC and the big networks know is going bye-bye.
The "spispopd" was something like "smashing pumpkins into small piles of p-something debris"? if I remember right.
I downloaded and tried the GL-version of DOOM a few months ago just for fun - the sound effects gave me an incredible rush of nostalgia. But damn the graphics suck, now that I'm used to Quake III!
My belief is, that the BSD will benefit from the BSD license. It is more free and allows for cooperation with industry. The GPL might have its advantages, but is not really the optimum for world of free and commercial/closed software.
So why hasn't that happened yet? I honestly don't want this to sound like a flame, but if you think the BSD license will encourage better industry cooperation, why is all the industry support for Linux?
For example, you can get closed-source drivers from NVidia, Sigma Designs, Aureal, and dozens of other companies for Linux... but not BSD. You can get Oracle and Wordperfect for Linux, but not BSD.
Where is the industry interest in the BSD license?
Or just get several differently watermarked files, and use a DSP to smooth over any differences...
I pretty much agree.
If you assume that everyone ends up purchasing and downloading SDMI-formatted digital music online, and each track has a watermark in it that uniquely identifies the purchaser, then to remove the watermark, what you would do is get a whole bunch of people to buy the track. Then convert each of them into a standard 44 KHz.WAV file, and average them all together.
However, if the watermark involves subtle changes in timing and pitch, then the process of "averaging" might be computationally expensive. You might also need a LOT of copies, each with different watermarks, in order to detect and remove all the changes.
But with enough differently watermarked copies and sufficient computational power, you will be able to detect all the changes and remove them. When you are done, reencode the resulting.WAV file back to MP3 and distribute.
Incidentally, I'm almost sure that the watermarking technology would use a combination of very subtle pitch shifting and timing changes in the music. Hiding information in the insignificant bits is useless - it would be trivial to remove. Adding inaudible sounds would also be useless - as another poster pointed out, the whole point of encoders like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is to remove the sounds you can't hear anyway.
So the only way I can see to watermark something would be to change pitches and timing. For example, a high-pitched note in a song might last for 0.5 seconds and be pitched at 9620 Hz. If that was changed to 9640 Hz, you wouldn't notice it was ever-so-slightly out of tune - but that change would survive encoding as MP3, and even being repeatedly run through DA/AD converters.
The averaging process to remove the watermark wouldn't be done in the space of "16 bit samples, 44K times per second", though. You would have to use a Fourier transformation to convert everything to some sort of frequency / time domain, and do the averaging in that space. But no sweat - that's how MP3 does compression anyway.
... Their own report says they have enough cash for 12 months of operations. RAMBUS needs to keep having people pay it royalties to stay alive. I suppose if a lot of the memory makers refuse to pay, get injunctions to back that up, then drag out the case for a couple of years they could really put the hurt-lock on the RAMBUS, perhaps even drive it out of business.
Yeah, your idea is better than mine. It's more likely to happen, and legal too.
But as another reply to my first comment said, even if they go out of business, their patent portfolio will probably end up purchased by some other company which might try to do the same aggressive things with it. But if it was a large, non-desparate company, like IBM, things would probably be better than they are now.
Of course the best solution is to reform patent law. And copyright law while we are at it...
However, I think reform of intellectual property laws is unlikely to happen any time soon. I've seen predictions that due to the closeness of the election and the distribution of seats in congress, not much is likely to get done for the next four years. Also, the US has signed world wide copyright treaty and trade legislation laws which might make changes difficult here - a really good reform of patent law might violate some treaty or something.
Under those circumstances, I think the best short term solution would be for Rambus to die and for IBM to buy their patents.
What if every significant computer hardware company, including Intel, AMD, VIA, NVidia, Micron, IBM, 3Com, Sony, National Semiconductor, etc. etc. simultaneously launched separate lawsuits against RAMBUS?
"For what cause", you ask? Well, something.... maybe fraud, or deceptive business practicies, or whatever...
The idea would just be to scare the investors so badly that Rambus's stock price would fall through the floor. Rambus probably has more lawyers then engineers on staff, and fighting a dozen lawsuits, plus all the bad PR they would get would make the company very unattractive to investors.
Then Intel (or whoever) could buy up all the stock for cheap, shut them down, and give away free licenses to the patents to all the other companies bringing lawsuits to "settle out of court".
Hey presto, no more RAMBUS problem. The only catch is, this would probably be illegal.
I think the relevant thing is how much you trust it. I mean, I trust my Win2K machine at work enough to read my hotmail, and even order things from CheapBytes and other web sites, typing in my credit card number each time. The risk is limited - someone could get my credit card number, but so what - the waiter at the Keg could get my credit card number too. VISA limits my liability there.
But I don't trust it (or even my heavily firewalled home computer) enough to do on line banking - if that was compromised, my entire bank account could be wiped out, my line of credit maxed out, and it would be a lot more difficult to recover, especially with "digitally signed" transactions proving that I really meant to do all that!
My point is, the term "trusted environment" is not a true/false description: it is a matter of degree.
The article (the author is Bruce Schneier, btw) sort of mentioned this as well, when he referred to transactions that have a monetary value too small to worry about...
Well, I watched the webcast (actually, the IRC transcript of it).
It looked to me like the reason.xxx and.kids were rejected was that ICANN wasn't sure how the policies could be enforced... Filtering? Constant inspections by the registrar? What about varying community standards from one country to another?
It just seemed too ambiguous. Similar problems seemed to be an issue with other proposals, like geographic (.geo) and telephony (.tel).
-----
PS. This was my very first slashdot submission to ever be accepted. Woohoo!
No, no, no. Internet Explorer is not in kernel space. Or at least it wasn't last time I heard, but who knows what MS has done recently. But that's not what everyone else is talking about.
We are comparing IIS - Internet Information Server - to Apache. They are web servers. IE is a web browser. IE is not the same as IIS.
IIS runs largely in kernel space for high speed on static pages, but takes a big hit on highly dynamic pages.
The new TUX web server for Linux is an optional kernel module which is kind of similar, but gives you the best of both worlds - kernel space httpd for very high speed on static pages, and it passes off requests for dynamic content to Apache which runs them very well.
I agree - it won't be going in. I read the Linux Kernel mailing list, and I haven't seen a single post on JFS in the last week.
It seems the biggest problem at the moment is last minute changes in the VM - Ric Van Riel has rewritten parts of the VM to be much faster, but there are some deadlock problems and other bugs being worked out.
On the other hand, many people are testing prerelease versions of 2.4.0 with the ReiserFS patches and not having problems. Even if ReiserFS doesn't make it into the official kernel release it will probably continue to be a "standard" patch and available in many distributions, such as SuSE and Mandrake.
There are already big improvements slated for the 2.5 series - a cleanup of all the IDE code, for example.
David Conrad: I look forward to seeing significantly increased use and interest in developing applications based on the RSA algorithm. Hopefully, the easing of US crypto controls earlier this year doesn't mean that someone has figured out how to factor large primes trivially...:-)
Er, Mr. Conrad, I can factor large primes trivially...
Seems like everyone makes this mistake sooner or later!
(for the confused: he meant "factor products of large primes trivially".)
The analog equivalent of a one-click purchase is having a tab at your favorite pub.
When you come in, the waiter/waitress recognizes you. You say "I'll have a Guiness" and they say "Sure thing, Mr. Hoffman!". 10 seconds later it's in front of you. They have your credit card number on file, so they don't need to ask you for cash or other money. At the end of the week you settle accounts and pay your tab.
This is "one-click" beer ordering. It's exactly like Amazon storing a cookie to recognize your browser and automatically charging your credit card.
If you had enough money for fuel to lift Mir out of earth's gravity well and send it off to the Sun or Mars, you could just keep it in orbit around earth for another ten years instead.
It's only 400 KM up. You'd have to lift it a lot higher before it would escape earth's gravity.
While Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, and RMS are certainly more important than many of the names on that list, remember that some their most significant achievements (the GUI, the Apple II, the GNU project and GPL license) are more than ten years old.
However, I agree that John Carmack ought to be on that list.
The other thing that makes the 4.95 a month proposal pointless is that Napster users could just get Napigator and switch to OpenNap.
I think the RIAA isn't interested in the proposal mainly because they want to extend their control and total ownership of music distribution into the online space... but also because they know that it would be pointless. The cat is already out of the bag.
Quake III Arena can use dual CPU's on Linux, Windows NT, or W2K. (And if you consider the T&L support on a GeForce or Radeon video card to be a processor, then Q3A supports three "processors", as it takes full advantage of T&L hardware.)
It's a pretty safe assumption that all the games that come out over the next year using the Q3A engine, like "American McGee's Alice" will support dual CPUs as well.
I've never had the pleasure of trying it myself, but according to John Carmack and reviewers, dual processors doesn't boost the maximum frame rate too much, but it does really help remove the drops in frame rate that one normally gets in highly complex scenes - like when 5 player models are on screen plus a bunch of explosions, curved surfaces, with gibs and rockets flying everywhere.
I think that Intel's continuing problems getting high-end CPU's out the door will make dual CPU machines ever more attractive for power users who run Linux or W2K. The price/performance comparasion is amazing - two PIII 700's cost $400, but a single PII 933 is at least $460. Dual CPU motherboards are not much more expensive, either.
Your're right - sort of. The biggest problem with laws like this is that "hacking tools" is obviously too vague. And vague laws are a license for selective enforcement - a way to get people thrown in jail when they have an attitude that powerful people don't like.
Owning computers, compilers, debuggers, and the like will be legal - until you do something with them that some government agency or big company doesn't like. Then they will call it "hacking" and the fact that you have those tools will be proof that you are a criminal.
Under a law like this, the people that reverse engineered CueCat could be charged with possession of hacking tools - the same software that millions of other people have - but their knowlege and application of those tools will magically make the tools themselves illegal.
I figure it will be time to leave the US and move to a free country in about 5 years at the rate things are going. Hope there are some free countries left by then.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I oversimplified the Mindcraft incident for the purposes of illustration. Microsoft, of course, did set up the test so that they knew they would win it. I'm sure they have their own benchmarking and polling facilities and whenever you see a Microsoft sponsored benchmark or poll that they won, you can be sure that they just paid to have some "independent" do the same thing that Microsoft already made sure they could win.
Nonetheless, the kernel developers (and of course, all the linux zealots) did at first believe that the problems were entirely due to the fact that the contest was rigged. It perhaps wasn't weeks of denial, but IIRC there were a few days.. until the Mindcraft retest, where the Linux machine was optimized as well.
IIRC, Linux 2.2.x would have had a difficult time beating NT on any similar 4-way SMP system with 4 ethernet cards, and the details of the hand optimization, RAID controllers and memory that people made a big deal about at the time turned out to be largely irrelevant.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yup. This might end up being like the Mindcraft tests that showed NT as being faster than Linux.
After a couple weeks of denial, the developers realized there really was a problem with Linux on high end hardware and started fixing it.
This is the same thing. People will be in denial about it for a while. Maybe, if things go well, the distribution developers will realize there is a problem. It's not like theres no solutions out there... if every consumer oriented distribution followed the Linux Standard Base, and the LSB was beefed up to include a lot more details like library versions, etc. then a program that worked on one distribution would have a much better chance of working on others. That just isn't true right now.
A lot of the problem is in the way 3D accelerated graphics and sound is configured. That's probably the hardest part of setting up Linux on the desktop right now. That's due to two factors: 1, X Windows only recently came out with a decent architechture for 3D graphics, replacing the older custom hacks which mostly were 3dfx-centered. Second, the graphics card market changes very quickly, and the very popular NVidia cards dont have fully open source drivers. This inevitably leads to compatibility problems. Unfortunately Quake III got stuck right in the middle of it.
The way Quake III was sold didn't help. If the Linux and Windows versions had hit store shelves at the same time, they would have sold a lot more of the Linux ones. But most Linux-loving gamers still keep a dual-boot Windows around for gaming and were not willing to wait for the Linux packages.
The situation can and will get better though. Hopefully, by June next year all the major distributions will be based on Linux 2.4, XFree86 4.0.1, and will have setup programs that actually work for 3D graphics. Hopefully libraries will become better standardized. KDE 2 and the next release of Gnome will probably bring a larger population of people who actually use Linux on the desktop without dual booting. Those people will want games.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well, I would agree that the article was painfully short on details. But I don't neccessarily think it was crap. Here's how I think they think it would work (reading between the lines).
1. The earth has a big magnetic field.
2. We can easily create big electromagnets with symmetrical magnetic fields.
3. Since the magnetic fields are symmetric, we can't use them for propulsion, or we would all be flying around in magnetically propelled cars already.
4. This potential new discovery of an asymmetric magnetic field gets around the problem of #3 by letting us build an asymmetrical magnetic field that will push against the earth's magnetic field, thereby producing propulsion.
5. They have to switch it on and off super fast to keep the field asymmetric.
Personally, I suspect that when the magnetic field collapses it will push in the opposite direction, thereby negating the effect. But maybe if you spin the magnet so it points the opposite direction when you turn it off...
I hope that somebody with a really strong understanding (like, a PHd grad student) of electromagnetic fields posts a big explanation in here somewhere.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
And I'll say it again: Are you sure the margins are thin? Do you have some evidence of that? I suspect the margins are not that bad.
I talked to one of the buyers today at work and he told me the price on the wide-format HP color printer we use. It's horrendously expensive, even though the technology is the same as their better consumer level inkjets - it uses the same ink cartridges, but the print head moves 4 feet instead of 9 inches. There is obviously a large margin on the high-end stuff. And the markup on those ink cartridges is huge too.
It's just like Intel - there's little margin on Celerons, but they make the money on the high end Xeon chips which only a little more to manufacture.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Personally, I only ever print receipts from on line shopping. But I'm surrounded by people at work who print everything. Printing is essential to most people who use computers. Why do you think people bought them all? Word processing started this whole revolution. If the computer can't print, it's useless for them.
You may be right that there's no margins. I don't know - I suspect there's pretty hefty markup on those monster network laser printers and large-format color printers that sit in the corners of a million offices in the country.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
This may sound really harsh taken out of context - in context I get the impression he was a little annoyed but still smiling.
I'm not sure how much he does it on purpose and how much is just his personality, but he keeps a pretty tight grip on the overall direction of the kernel, mostly by understanding the code better than anyone else.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree - in fact, I would be willing to bet $100 bucks that if they actually make this decision, they will change their minds and reverse it within 5 years. In less than 3 years it will be obvious to everyone that it was the wrong thing to do.
Why? Two related reasons. First: Soon, TV will commonly delivered over IP. The lines between TV and the Internet are going to start blurring. Next generation set top boxes that pull MPEG-2 video straight off IP multicast over DSL and cablemodems are already out there, making money.
That will enable stage 2: a world where there will be services like Napster for TV - imagine being able to access a gigantic on line library of TV content - watch any episode of X-Files or the Simpsons, whenever you want!
And it will be legal, but probably not free. For example, I quit watching TV two years ago. I can't stand the ads, and having watch my favorite shows only when the network decides they should be scheduled. Everyone who is used to the web will want TV to be the same - A flat fee for access, and then watch what you want, when you want. (TIVO is a step in the right direction).
The IOC thinks they will get more money by locking out competition to the current broadcasters. How foolish!
Soon, the broadcasters with the money will be the ones that provide people with exactly what they want. The world the IOC and the big networks know is going bye-bye.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Thanks for OpenBSD, Theo. It runs my firewall.
I love the cute new version of the blowfish logo! From the file name, it looks like she's called "Sushi".
So my questions are (a) Who is the artist, and (b) When will there be a T-shirt with a picture of Sushi printed really big?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The "spispopd" was something like "smashing pumpkins into small piles of p-something debris"? if I remember right.
I downloaded and tried the GL-version of DOOM a few months ago just for fun - the sound effects gave me an incredible rush of nostalgia. But damn the graphics suck, now that I'm used to Quake III!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
- idspispopd
- iddqd
and I haven't played DOOM in years!Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
For example, you can get closed-source drivers from NVidia, Sigma Designs, Aureal, and dozens of other companies for Linux... but not BSD. You can get Oracle and Wordperfect for Linux, but not BSD.
Where is the industry interest in the BSD license?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If you assume that everyone ends up purchasing and downloading SDMI-formatted digital music online, and each track has a watermark in it that uniquely identifies the purchaser, then to remove the watermark, what you would do is get a whole bunch of people to buy the track. Then convert each of them into a standard 44 KHz
However, if the watermark involves subtle changes in timing and pitch, then the process of "averaging" might be computationally expensive. You might also need a LOT of copies, each with different watermarks, in order to detect and remove all the changes.
But with enough differently watermarked copies and sufficient computational power, you will be able to detect all the changes and remove them. When you are done, reencode the resulting
Incidentally, I'm almost sure that the watermarking technology would use a combination of very subtle pitch shifting and timing changes in the music. Hiding information in the insignificant bits is useless - it would be trivial to remove. Adding inaudible sounds would also be useless - as another poster pointed out, the whole point of encoders like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis is to remove the sounds you can't hear anyway.
So the only way I can see to watermark something would be to change pitches and timing. For example, a high-pitched note in a song might last for 0.5 seconds and be pitched at 9620 Hz. If that was changed to 9640 Hz, you wouldn't notice it was ever-so-slightly out of tune - but that change would survive encoding as MP3, and even being repeatedly run through DA/AD converters.
The averaging process to remove the watermark wouldn't be done in the space of "16 bit samples, 44K times per second", though. You would have to use a Fourier transformation to convert everything to some sort of frequency / time domain, and do the averaging in that space. But no sweat - that's how MP3 does compression anyway.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
But as another reply to my first comment said, even if they go out of business, their patent portfolio will probably end up purchased by some other company which might try to do the same aggressive things with it. But if it was a large, non-desparate company, like IBM, things would probably be better than they are now.
Of course the best solution is to reform patent law. And copyright law while we are at it...
However, I think reform of intellectual property laws is unlikely to happen any time soon. I've seen predictions that due to the closeness of the election and the distribution of seats in congress, not much is likely to get done for the next four years. Also, the US has signed world wide copyright treaty and trade legislation laws which might make changes difficult here - a really good reform of patent law might violate some treaty or something.
Under those circumstances, I think the best short term solution would be for Rambus to die and for IBM to buy their patents.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I wonder...
What if every significant computer hardware company, including Intel, AMD, VIA, NVidia, Micron, IBM, 3Com, Sony, National Semiconductor, etc. etc. simultaneously launched separate lawsuits against RAMBUS?
"For what cause", you ask? Well, something.... maybe fraud, or deceptive business practicies, or whatever...
The idea would just be to scare the investors so badly that Rambus's stock price would fall through the floor. Rambus probably has more lawyers then engineers on staff, and fighting a dozen lawsuits, plus all the bad PR they would get would make the company very unattractive to investors.
Then Intel (or whoever) could buy up all the stock for cheap, shut them down, and give away free licenses to the patents to all the other companies bringing lawsuits to "settle out of court".
Hey presto, no more RAMBUS problem. The only catch is, this would probably be illegal.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
So you trust your Windows 98 computer...
I think the relevant thing is how much you trust it. I mean, I trust my Win2K machine at work enough to read my hotmail, and even order things from CheapBytes and other web sites, typing in my credit card number each time. The risk is limited - someone could get my credit card number, but so what - the waiter at the Keg could get my credit card number too. VISA limits my liability there.
But I don't trust it (or even my heavily firewalled home computer) enough to do on line banking - if that was compromised, my entire bank account could be wiped out, my line of credit maxed out, and it would be a lot more difficult to recover, especially with "digitally signed" transactions proving that I really meant to do all that!
My point is, the term "trusted environment" is not a true/false description: it is a matter of degree.
The article (the author is Bruce Schneier, btw) sort of mentioned this as well, when he referred to transactions that have a monetary value too small to worry about...
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well, I watched the webcast (actually, the IRC transcript of it).
.xxx and .kids were rejected was that ICANN wasn't sure how the policies could be enforced... Filtering? Constant inspections by the registrar? What about varying community standards from one country to another?
It looked to me like the reason
It just seemed too ambiguous. Similar problems seemed to be an issue with other proposals, like geographic (.geo) and telephony (.tel).
-----
PS. This was my very first slashdot submission to ever be accepted. Woohoo!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No, no, no. Internet Explorer is not in kernel space. Or at least it wasn't last time I heard, but who knows what MS has done recently. But that's not what everyone else is talking about.
We are comparing IIS - Internet Information Server - to Apache. They are web servers. IE is a web browser. IE is not the same as IIS.
IIS runs largely in kernel space for high speed on static pages, but takes a big hit on highly dynamic pages.
The new TUX web server for Linux is an optional kernel module which is kind of similar, but gives you the best of both worlds - kernel space httpd for very high speed on static pages, and it passes off requests for dynamic content to Apache which runs them very well.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree - it won't be going in. I read the Linux Kernel mailing list, and I haven't seen a single post on JFS in the last week.
It seems the biggest problem at the moment is last minute changes in the VM - Ric Van Riel has rewritten parts of the VM to be much faster, but there are some deadlock problems and other bugs being worked out.
On the other hand, many people are testing prerelease versions of 2.4.0 with the ReiserFS patches and not having problems. Even if ReiserFS doesn't make it into the official kernel release it will probably continue to be a "standard" patch and available in many distributions, such as SuSE and Mandrake.
There are already big improvements slated for the 2.5 series - a cleanup of all the IDE code, for example.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Seems like everyone makes this mistake sooner or later!
(for the confused: he meant "factor products of large primes trivially".)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The analog equivalent of a one-click purchase is having a tab at your favorite pub.
When you come in, the waiter/waitress recognizes you. You say "I'll have a Guiness" and they say "Sure thing, Mr. Hoffman!". 10 seconds later it's in front of you. They have your credit card number on file, so they don't need to ask you for cash or other money. At the end of the week you settle accounts and pay your tab.
This is "one-click" beer ordering. It's exactly like Amazon storing a cookie to recognize your browser and automatically charging your credit card.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If you had enough money for fuel to lift Mir out of earth's gravity well and send it off to the Sun or Mars, you could just keep it in orbit around earth for another ten years instead.
It's only 400 KM up. You'd have to lift it a lot higher before it would escape earth's gravity.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Er... it's the top ten people of the decade.
While Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, and RMS are certainly more important than many of the names on that list, remember that some their most significant achievements (the GUI, the Apple II, the GNU project and GPL license) are more than ten years old.
However, I agree that John Carmack ought to be on that list.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The other thing that makes the 4.95 a month proposal pointless is that Napster users could just get Napigator and switch to OpenNap.
I think the RIAA isn't interested in the proposal mainly because they want to extend their control and total ownership of music distribution into the online space... but also because they know that it would be pointless. The cat is already out of the bag.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Quake III Arena can use dual CPU's on Linux, Windows NT, or W2K. (And if you consider the T&L support on a GeForce or Radeon video card to be a processor, then Q3A supports three "processors", as it takes full advantage of T&L hardware.)
It's a pretty safe assumption that all the games that come out over the next year using the Q3A engine, like "American McGee's Alice" will support dual CPUs as well.
I've never had the pleasure of trying it myself, but according to John Carmack and reviewers, dual processors doesn't boost the maximum frame rate too much, but it does really help remove the drops in frame rate that one normally gets in highly complex scenes - like when 5 player models are on screen plus a bunch of explosions, curved surfaces, with gibs and rockets flying everywhere.
I think that Intel's continuing problems getting high-end CPU's out the door will make dual CPU machines ever more attractive for power users who run Linux or W2K. The price/performance comparasion is amazing - two PIII 700's cost $400, but a single PII 933 is at least $460. Dual CPU motherboards are not much more expensive, either.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Your're right - sort of. The biggest problem with laws like this is that "hacking tools" is obviously too vague. And vague laws are a license for selective enforcement - a way to get people thrown in jail when they have an attitude that powerful people don't like.
Owning computers, compilers, debuggers, and the like will be legal - until you do something with them that some government agency or big company doesn't like. Then they will call it "hacking" and the fact that you have those tools will be proof that you are a criminal.
Under a law like this, the people that reverse engineered CueCat could be charged with possession of hacking tools - the same software that millions of other people have - but their knowlege and application of those tools will magically make the tools themselves illegal.
I figure it will be time to leave the US and move to a free country in about 5 years at the rate things are going. Hope there are some free countries left by then.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)