If OSS is so much better at finding and eliminating bugs then why is Mozilla still a buggy mess that doesn't stay up more than 15 minutes in my normal usage?
Because Mozilla is not done yet. I never stated that OSS was a cure-all -- indeed, I pointed out it most certainly is not. No matter what development methods you use, implementing the requirements of the Mozilla project is a huge job, arguably much more complex then the Linux kernel. Linux is almost ten years old; Mozilla is barely two. Do you expect miracles?
I wouldn't call Mozilla a buggy mess, either. Progress in Mozilla has been quite dramatic lately, and bugs are being found and fixed at a rapid rate.
I also think that OSS will not go very far...
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but it already has gone quite far.
Without a good understanding of the requirements there is no way to certify that a program behaves as it should.
OSS typically focuses on more informal measures of testing, rather then formal proofs of correctness. OSS is hardly alone in that respect. Most widely distributed software is more concerned about getting the job done then satisfying the criteria assigned by a third-year CS professor.
Still, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, the biggest advantage free software has in this regard is flexible deadlines. Projects aren't done until they really are done, since there's typically no sales department or management to set a deadline.
I disagree. I believe OSS wins because it does better at parallizing those tasks that can be parallized, not because it lacks deadlines.
In most cases, the deadlines are self-imposed and easily movable, but that does not make Brooks's Law invalid. If Linus wants Linux 2.4 to be out next week, throwing 50 more people at him is going to make things worse. Just because we can say "Oh, well, we didn't make the deadline, no big deal" does not mean the deadline was not missed.
If a project really doesn't have a deadline, then throwing more people at it is still going to slow it down. You just don't have as obvious a yard stick to measure it with.
It is true that, because OSS projects usually don't have unrealistic pressure from sales and management, there is no temptation to throw more programmers at them to meet an arbitrary deadline. This just means OSS developers understand Brooks's law, and don't try to fight it. It is still there.
I hate the slashdot mentality. Just because you can get something for free doesn't mean that's what you should do.
There is a small but vocal minority on Slashdot who believe intellectual property is wrong, and that all forms of media should be freely copyable. I feel you are being unfair in generallizing their behavior to cover the entire Slashdot readership. I certainly agree with your assertion that no charge != better.
Near as I can tell, most (not all) of these people are trying to justify their pirate copies of Quake II and The Matrix after the fact. I guess they must have a pretty guilty conscience, since they seem to need to keep justifying it, over and over and over again.
The rest have a legitimate belief that IP is wrong. They are entitled to their opinion, but personally, I think their logic is flawed. In any event, they are not the ones who post comments like "Heh, heh, I've had it on CD since it came out. I'm so 1337!"
but you'll settle for it anyways, because of the percieved value of the dollar.
Well, in many cases, you have to look beyond just price or just performance to the price-performance ratio. True, brand XYZ may be twice as fast as brand ABC, but if XYZ costs three times as much, you are often better off buying two of ABC for less then one XYZ will cost. Not that this really has anything to do with pirate video.:)
That's the entire reason I disagree with opensource... NOt creating anything new, just reinventing the old for cheaper.
Hmmmm. Seems like an obvious troll, but since I'm already here: "reinventing the old for cheaper" is hardly what Open Source Software is about.
It is ironic that Brook's law seems to take a lot of starch out of the percieved benefits of open sourcing a project, especially a project that already has had a head start.
Actually, one of the points Eric Raymond makes in favor of Open Source Software is that OSS helps reduce the limitations of Brooks's Law.
Brooks's Law says: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This is often stated more formally as: Programmer time is not fungible. If a program takes one programmer one day to write, it does not nessicarily follow that two programmers can do the job in half the time.
Mr. Brooks makes the observation that, in matters of programming, which is essentially codifying thought, the overhead of communication is very significant. Two cotton-pickers can pick twice as much cotton because they can work on separate parts of the field, but a program module can only be worked on by one designer.
Eric Raymond has observed that testing and debugging is fungible. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." With a couple hundred people looking at the code, testing it, and tracking down and fixing bugs, you can reduce test time dramatically. Since Brooks also observed that test time is often the single largest task out of the total time you need to devote to a project's development, this is very significant.
OSS still needs a central coordinator for each module. Someone to handle the design and make decisions as to what code gets accepted and what gets rejected. Take Linux: Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox spend as much, if not more, time filtering patches and making design decisions as they do writing code. But OSS allows the actual work of testing and fixing to be done by others.
OSS is not a cure-all. It hardly scales perfectly, but it does scale better then closed development does.
Oh, and BTW, it is "Brooks", with an "S" on the end. Not "Brook".:-)
First off, you are no longer pushing your data through a 16 byte fifo buffer, that is costing you over 300 interupts a second at 53k...
What you are describing are deficiencies in the standard PC UART (based on National Semiconductor P/N 16550A). It has been known for over a decade that the 16550A is unsuitable for anything like modern, multitasking systems. Unfortunately, like so much of the PC, we are tied to a legacy standard choosen twenty years ago for completely obsolete reasons.
If you want to improve modem efficiency, use a better serial interface and larger buffers. USB would be a good start, as there is already a standard. Make the interface tunable, so you can use larger buffers with fewer interrupts and higher latency (good for web browsing, downloading, etc.) or smaller buffers and more interrupts to reduce latency for gaming.
However, none of this has anything to do with the modem itself. Moving the modem DSP functions off the modem card and onto the system bus and CPU increase overhead and latency, without a significant savings in hardware costs. As near as I can tell, they are popular only because the current commodity market makes saving three bucks a unit significant when you are building a million of them.
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." -- G'Kar in TV's Babylon 5
To me, taking advantage of a $400 screwup in a company worth billions, which has regarlly ignored any and all pretense of the law in squashing competition, and makes my life a living hell from time to time, sounds just fine.
Morality isn't a science. It doesn't come down to rules like "The end doesn't justify the means" (as a friend of mine once said, very often the end is part of the means) or "Two wrongs don't make a right" (that would invalidate all forms of punishment). I can't give you a logic proof, but I do not see one damn thing wrong with giving Microsoft back a little of what they've happily dished out in the past.
LinuxOne appears to fall into the same category as the side-show both operators at the local fair, selling tickets to let you see the two-headed horse and the lizard man. P.T. Barnum had it right when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Sigh. I wish people would let me know why they reject things.
To put it bluntly: Get over it.
You submitted a suggestion for a story. The idea is to send ideas to the Slashdot crew, not to boost your ego by putting your email address in a mailto: link on Slashdot's homepage. It isn't like you didn't get your pay check or someone stole your hard drive.
As for why: Maybe Rob saw it and didn't like it, but Jeff did. Maybe there were too many stories that week. Maybe the reviewer was just tired. Of all the things in the world to get worked up over, this has got to be one of the silliest.
I haven't heard much of a good argument against devfs.
devfs impacts every device driver in the kernel, true, but one assumes that if it is worthwhile, we can deal with that. Kernel-wide changes have been done before and will be again. And most of the changes have been done as patches by the devfs maintainer already. So that isn't the real issue.
devfs would add complexity to the kernel, but so does everything else that adds code. So that isn't the real reason.
You would lose persistance of the/dev/ directory structure, true, but a method to write out changes and read them back in at boot would be very simple to implement. You lose anything in the buffer-cache if you power-off without sync'ing, but nobody complains about that. So that isn't the issue.
In the end, it always comes down to "What we have now works fine, and we've done it this way forever, so why change?" The idea of replacing the/dev/ directory is too big a change to swallow for some people. Some of those people are kernel hackers with demigod or higher status, so the change isn't going in.
Too bad, really. I think devfs has a lot of merit to it.
I think the article is centering on the memory bus in the computer, and not so much an external bus.
They clearly talk about multiple slots, power supply issues, the classses being storage, network, video, and cluster, and so on. It is obviously about external buses and not system memory. Indeed, there is a discussion about how to connect the serial buses to system memory.
Back in the {good,bad} old days of DOS-based, dial-up local BBSes, one very popular package was called PCBoard. They were up to Version 15.9 or something before BBSing really started to die out and I lost track. Nobody thought PCBoard was {older,newer,worse,better} because it had a higher verison number.
Ultimately, it reflects the intelligence of your user community. Maybe your users are so dumb that they need to be told what year their software is from. Maybe they can figure out what "Version 3.1.4, Released 5-APR-2002" means.
The new owner of the Amiga brand announced today that they would be changing their name to Vapor, Inc. Company President, Nopra Duct, said it signaled an innovative new strategic direction for the company. "People accuse Microsoft of selling vaporware, but we haven't released a new product in years! That puts Microsoft to shame, and they're the most powerful company in the known universe. Just think where we will be in two years!"
The company also announced plans for an IPO, including gratuitous use of the words "Internet", "E-Commerce", and "Linux". They plan to trade under the ticker symbol NULL.
(Editor's Note: The above is what is called "humor". Look it up in the dictionary.)
As opposed to myself. I resolve to quit smoking, because it tends to char my clothes, and people tell me the smell of burned flesh is not attractive. Heck, even getting my extremities lit so I can smoke is getting difficult, as I've burned off all my fingers now. (I'm typing this with my nose.)
You are such a stupid shit, everyone with my intellect knows the Millennium starts next year.
A millennium is defined to be one thousand years. It says nothing about which thousand years. The issue is that, if you start counting from the first day of January, year 1, AD, you will not reach 2000 years until 1 Jan 2001.
But, consider: All dates are arbitrary creations of mankind, and the turning point between 31 Dec 1 BC and 1 Jan 1 AD is particularly arbitrary.
So, define the "First Millennium AD" to begin 1 Jan 1 BC. Thus, 1 Jan 2000 will be the first day of the Third Millennium. Problem solved, and we can use dramatic words to describe the dramatic numbers.;-)
Digital media is for storing data. Period. Digital video is just another kind of data.
I agree with you here, but I feel it is is important to point out that for some things, digital media should go beyond simply storing data. Again, use CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) as an example. Without some sort of standard for how to encode the audio, we might have to deal with mutually incompatible music CDs and players. Oh, what joy that would be! Likewise, a universal file system format (i.e., ISO-9660) is a Good Thing. Standards are good, and the people designing digital media should look beyond simply storing the data.
Things that do not belong are things that have nothing to do with the presentation of the data. Copy protection being a good example. Copy protection is the job of the police, not the media format.
What makes you think the original CD was well-designed?
It seems to do the job very well. What makes you say it was not well-designed?
Even then the thinking was: entertainment first, computer storage second.
I think that is/was a reasonable call, especially when you consider the technology at the time: The Compact Disc was being designed when the IBM PC/XT and Apple//e were still the standard home computers, and most people didn't have home PCs. If you had come in screaming about multimedia, people would have gone, "Huh? What's that?"
Even more recently, when the DVD was being designed, home video had a much broader market. We've only been seeing anything like convergence the past couple of years. And the DVD did end up including standards for pure data storage. There just has not been enough demand for it. A CD-ROM stores a lot of data; the practical difference between CD and DVD is far less then the difference between CD and floppy is.
I'm not intimately familiar with the internal details but suffice to say that writing an audio-copying program that works reliably is no mean feat - because the storage format is all screwed up.
Here your lack of knowledge gets you. The CD is designed to be a cheap way to accomplish mass distribution of identical bulk data. Mass production is accomplished by stamping the CDs using a press. This works very well, but it means that small-use applications -- that is, recordable CDs -- get tricky. You have to sustain a continuous data stream to to write laser, or you will stall and ruin the disc. This is a trade off you have to make if you want cheap mass production (of both software and music). It is not a design error.
I'd like to see DVD's go the way of 8-track tapes. The whole idea was wrong from the start.
I disagree. The idea of DVD is a good one. Put a whole movie in high-quality digital format, with professional sound and interactive features, on a high-capacity compact disc that can also hold arbitrary data for computers. Sounds like the Compact Disc, Stage Two. Great idea!
Then a bunch of blood-sucking lawyers and money-grubbing corporations got wind of it, and decided that they could Make The World A Better Place (for them) by loading it up with cheap copy protection schemes. Rather like those annoying key disks from 1980s IBM-PC software, it didn't do much to stop copying, but made everything a whole lot more difficult for the people who actually want to legitimately use the thing.
If DVD had turned out like the original CD -- just a media, not a copyright law enforcement agency -- I think everyone would have been better off, the DVD Forum included.
You assert an Internet petition to show support would be worthless. I don't agree. Now, I don't think a simple petition is going to make all our problems go away. But it will serve to do a number of things. For starters, it will give *us* an idea of just how many people actually do care. Such a number is useful in discussions and debates. Any movement to sign a petition will likely raise public awareness -- always a good thing.
Furthermore, a strong showing of support through such a petition might help our cause. It would be useful evidence if "harm to consumers" is a factor in the court, as it sometimes is. If we get a large enough response, it may get some attention in the industry. Large companies do not like to lose customers, and if they see a large amount of consumer awareness and concern, they may reconsider things. You raise the point that the DVD Forum holds a monopoly; a large consumer movement may bring anti-trust scrutiny to bear on the DVD Forum, and that is the *last* thing they want.
Do I know for sure that a petition will cause these things to happen? Of course not. But I think such a petition gives you a good return on very little investment, and would be worth trying.
Like most of the people in the world, I do not live anywhere near California. So I cannot go to the court house to protest it.
So, I want to know: Is there anything the rest of us can do to support the opposition to the repression of the DVD Forum? Can we start an Internet petition to indicate our support? Something along the lines of the Blue Ribbon Campaign of the EFF?
Are people contacting their local news agencies, and explaining why the DVD Forum is in the wrong?
Is there an address (snail mail) at the DVD Forum we can write to complain? (I want snail mail because email is ignored too easily.)
The DVD Forum will only win if this stays small. A hundred thousand angry consumers will fold them right quick.
The fact that (maddog != JohnTHall) does not mean that (maddog.employer != VALinux). Jon Hall is "Director of Linux Evangelism" at VA Linux Systems; you can email him there at maddog@valinux.com.
So, maddog, now that VA Linux has gone public, what are you going to do with all that money you made in the IPO?;-)
(To the readership: The above is a joke. maddog says that if you think you have trouble with spam, try being mistaken for a newly rich VP at VA Linux.)
Why should I, as a potential product designer, want to release my code if the potential exists for misuse?
You are going to release your code one way or the other, regardless. If you release the source code under a generous, open source license, then everybody will benefit. If you release just the binary, with a restrictive license, then only those willing to ignore your license, break the law, and reverse engineer your program will benefit. (And if you don't release anything, nobody benefits.)
Security through obscurity never works. If your argument is that not releasing the source code is a serious roadblock to the crackers in the world, that is naive, I'm sorry.:-)
But I too want USB and not serial interface. So I've decided to wait for a Visor...
The Visor is a real neat device. The "Springboard" is one step removed from PCMCIA in a Palm Pilot, and I think that is great.
However, the Visor does have one problem, what I consider a fatal flaw: It uses regular ROM to store the OS. Not flash ROM. This means you are locked into the version of PalmOS that ships with the Visor. 3.1, I think. This really sucks.
You may not care, but it is definiately something to be aware of.
Slashdot Mirror
If OSS is so much better at finding and eliminating bugs then why is Mozilla still a buggy mess that doesn't stay up more than 15 minutes in my normal usage?
Because Mozilla is not done yet. I never stated that OSS was a cure-all -- indeed, I pointed out it most certainly is not. No matter what development methods you use, implementing the requirements of the Mozilla project is a huge job, arguably much more complex then the Linux kernel. Linux is almost ten years old; Mozilla is barely two. Do you expect miracles?
I wouldn't call Mozilla a buggy mess, either. Progress in Mozilla has been quite dramatic lately, and bugs are being found and fixed at a rapid rate.
I also think that OSS will not go very far...
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but it already has gone quite far.
Without a good understanding of the requirements there is no way to certify that a program behaves as it should.
OSS typically focuses on more informal measures of testing, rather then formal proofs of correctness. OSS is hardly alone in that respect. Most widely distributed software is more concerned about getting the job done then satisfying the criteria assigned by a third-year CS professor.
Still, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, the biggest advantage free software has in this regard is flexible deadlines. Projects aren't done until they really are done, since there's typically no sales department or management to set a deadline.
I disagree. I believe OSS wins because it does better at parallizing those tasks that can be parallized, not because it lacks deadlines.
In most cases, the deadlines are self-imposed and easily movable, but that does not make Brooks's Law invalid. If Linus wants Linux 2.4 to be out next week, throwing 50 more people at him is going to make things worse. Just because we can say "Oh, well, we didn't make the deadline, no big deal" does not mean the deadline was not missed.
If a project really doesn't have a deadline, then throwing more people at it is still going to slow it down. You just don't have as obvious a yard stick to measure it with.
It is true that, because OSS projects usually don't have unrealistic pressure from sales and management, there is no temptation to throw more programmers at them to meet an arbitrary deadline. This just means OSS developers understand Brooks's law, and don't try to fight it. It is still there.
I hate the slashdot mentality. Just because you can get something for free doesn't mean that's what you should do.
:)
There is a small but vocal minority on Slashdot who believe intellectual property is wrong, and that all forms of media should be freely copyable. I feel you are being unfair in generallizing their behavior to cover the entire Slashdot readership. I certainly agree with your assertion that no charge != better.
Near as I can tell, most (not all) of these people are trying to justify their pirate copies of Quake II and The Matrix after the fact. I guess they must have a pretty guilty conscience, since they seem to need to keep justifying it, over and over and over again.
The rest have a legitimate belief that IP is wrong. They are entitled to their opinion, but personally, I think their logic is flawed. In any event, they are not the ones who post comments like "Heh, heh, I've had it on CD since it came out. I'm so 1337!"
but you'll settle for it anyways, because of the percieved value of the dollar.
Well, in many cases, you have to look beyond just price or just performance to the price-performance ratio. True, brand XYZ may be twice as fast as brand ABC, but if XYZ costs three times as much, you are often better off buying two of ABC for less then one XYZ will cost. Not that this really has anything to do with pirate video.
That's the entire reason I disagree with opensource... NOt creating anything new, just reinventing the old for cheaper.
Hmmmm. Seems like an obvious troll, but since I'm already here: "reinventing the old for cheaper" is hardly what Open Source Software is about.
It is ironic that Brook's law seems to take a lot of starch out of the percieved benefits of open sourcing a project, especially a project that already has had a head start.
:-)
Actually, one of the points Eric Raymond makes in favor of Open Source Software is that OSS helps reduce the limitations of Brooks's Law.
Brooks's Law says: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This is often stated more formally as: Programmer time is not fungible. If a program takes one programmer one day to write, it does not nessicarily follow that two programmers can do the job in half the time.
Mr. Brooks makes the observation that, in matters of programming, which is essentially codifying thought, the overhead of communication is very significant. Two cotton-pickers can pick twice as much cotton because they can work on separate parts of the field, but a program module can only be worked on by one designer.
Eric Raymond has observed that testing and debugging is fungible. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." With a couple hundred people looking at the code, testing it, and tracking down and fixing bugs, you can reduce test time dramatically. Since Brooks also observed that test time is often the single largest task out of the total time you need to devote to a project's development, this is very significant.
OSS still needs a central coordinator for each module. Someone to handle the design and make decisions as to what code gets accepted and what gets rejected. Take Linux: Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox spend as much, if not more, time filtering patches and making design decisions as they do writing code. But OSS allows the actual work of testing and fixing to be done by others.
OSS is not a cure-all. It hardly scales perfectly, but it does scale better then closed development does.
Oh, and BTW, it is "Brooks", with an "S" on the end. Not "Brook".
First off, you are no longer pushing your data through a 16 byte fifo buffer, that is costing you over 300 interupts a second at 53k...
What you are describing are deficiencies in the standard PC UART (based on National Semiconductor P/N 16550A). It has been known for over a decade that the 16550A is unsuitable for anything like modern, multitasking systems. Unfortunately, like so much of the PC, we are tied to a legacy standard choosen twenty years ago for completely obsolete reasons.
If you want to improve modem efficiency, use a better serial interface and larger buffers. USB would be a good start, as there is already a standard. Make the interface tunable, so you can use larger buffers with fewer interrupts and higher latency (good for web browsing, downloading, etc.) or smaller buffers and more interrupts to reduce latency for gaming.
However, none of this has anything to do with the modem itself. Moving the modem DSP functions off the modem card and onto the system bus and CPU increase overhead and latency, without a significant savings in hardware costs. As near as I can tell, they are popular only because the current commodity market makes saving three bucks a unit significant when you are building a million of them.
"The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest."
-- G'Kar in TV's Babylon 5
To me, taking advantage of a $400 screwup in a company worth billions, which has regarlly ignored any and all pretense of the law in squashing competition, and makes my life a living hell from time to time, sounds just fine.
Morality isn't a science. It doesn't come down to rules like "The end doesn't justify the means" (as a friend of mine once said, very often the end is part of the means) or "Two wrongs don't make a right" (that would invalidate all forms of punishment). I can't give you a logic proof, but I do not see one damn thing wrong with giving Microsoft back a little of what they've happily dished out in the past.
Consider it payment on a loan.
LinuxOne appears to fall into the same category as the side-show both operators at the local fair, selling tickets to let you see the two-headed horse and the lizard man. P.T. Barnum had it right when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Sigh. I wish people would let me know why they reject things.
To put it bluntly: Get over it.
You submitted a suggestion for a story. The idea is to send ideas to the Slashdot crew, not to boost your ego by putting your email address in a mailto: link on Slashdot's homepage. It isn't like you didn't get your pay check or someone stole your hard drive.
As for why: Maybe Rob saw it and didn't like it, but Jeff did. Maybe there were too many stories that week. Maybe the reviewer was just tired. Of all the things in the world to get worked up over, this has got to be one of the silliest.
As an aside: This gets "+1 Insightful"?
I haven't heard much of a good argument against devfs.
/dev/ directory structure, true, but a method to write out changes and read them back in at boot would be very simple to implement. You lose anything in the buffer-cache if you power-off without sync'ing, but nobody complains about that. So that isn't the issue.
/dev/ directory is too big a change to swallow for some people. Some of those people are kernel hackers with demigod or higher status, so the change isn't going in.
devfs impacts every device driver in the kernel, true, but one assumes that if it is worthwhile, we can deal with that. Kernel-wide changes have been done before and will be again. And most of the changes have been done as patches by the devfs maintainer already. So that isn't the real issue.
devfs would add complexity to the kernel, but so does everything else that adds code. So that isn't the real reason.
You would lose persistance of the
In the end, it always comes down to "What we have now works fine, and we've done it this way forever, so why change?" The idea of replacing the
Too bad, really. I think devfs has a lot of merit to it.
I think the article is centering on the memory bus in the computer, and not so much an external bus.
:)
They clearly talk about multiple slots, power supply issues, the classses being storage, network, video, and cluster, and so on. It is obviously about external buses and not system memory. Indeed, there is a discussion about how to connect the serial buses to system memory.
Admit it: You didn't read the article.
oracle is in what, version 9 or 10 or something?
Back in the {good,bad} old days of DOS-based, dial-up local BBSes, one very popular package was called PCBoard. They were up to Version 15.9 or something before BBSing really started to die out and I lost track. Nobody thought PCBoard was {older,newer,worse,better} because it had a higher verison number.
Ultimately, it reflects the intelligence of your user community. Maybe your users are so dumb that they need to be told what year their software is from. Maybe they can figure out what "Version 3.1.4, Released 5-APR-2002" means.
The new owner of the Amiga brand announced today that they would be changing their name to Vapor, Inc. Company President, Nopra Duct, said it signaled an innovative new strategic direction for the company. "People accuse Microsoft of selling vaporware, but we haven't released a new product in years! That puts Microsoft to shame, and they're the most powerful company in the known universe. Just think where we will be in two years!"
The company also announced plans for an IPO, including gratuitous use of the words "Internet", "E-Commerce", and "Linux". They plan to trade under the ticker symbol NULL.
(Editor's Note: The above is what is called "humor". Look it up in the dictionary.)
e) quit smoking again (cigs that is)
As opposed to myself. I resolve to quit smoking, because it tends to char my clothes, and people tell me the smell of burned flesh is not attractive. Heck, even getting my extremities lit so I can smoke is getting difficult, as I've burned off all my fingers now. (I'm typing this with my nose.)
You are such a stupid shit, everyone with my intellect knows the Millennium starts next year.
;-)
A millennium is defined to be one thousand years. It says nothing about which thousand years. The issue is that, if you start counting from the first day of January, year 1, AD, you will not reach 2000 years until 1 Jan 2001.
But, consider: All dates are arbitrary creations of mankind, and the turning point between 31 Dec 1 BC and 1 Jan 1 AD is particularly arbitrary.
So, define the "First Millennium AD" to begin 1 Jan 1 BC. Thus, 1 Jan 2000 will be the first day of the Third Millennium. Problem solved, and we can use dramatic words to describe the dramatic numbers.
Or, so I rationalize it.
Digital media is for storing data. Period. Digital video is just another kind of data.
//e were still the standard home computers, and most people didn't have home PCs. If you had come in screaming about multimedia, people would have gone, "Huh? What's that?"
I agree with you here, but I feel it is is important to point out that for some things, digital media should go beyond simply storing data. Again, use CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) as an example. Without some sort of standard for how to encode the audio, we might have to deal with mutually incompatible music CDs and players. Oh, what joy that would be! Likewise, a universal file system format (i.e., ISO-9660) is a Good Thing. Standards are good, and the people designing digital media should look beyond simply storing the data.
Things that do not belong are things that have nothing to do with the presentation of the data. Copy protection being a good example. Copy protection is the job of the police, not the media format.
What makes you think the original CD was well-designed?
It seems to do the job very well. What makes you say it was not well-designed?
Even then the thinking was: entertainment first, computer storage second.
I think that is/was a reasonable call, especially when you consider the technology at the time: The Compact Disc was being designed when the IBM PC/XT and Apple
Even more recently, when the DVD was being designed, home video had a much broader market. We've only been seeing anything like convergence the past couple of years. And the DVD did end up including standards for pure data storage. There just has not been enough demand for it. A CD-ROM stores a lot of data; the practical difference between CD and DVD is far less then the difference between CD and floppy is.
I'm not intimately familiar with the internal details but suffice to say that writing an audio-copying program that works reliably is no mean feat - because the storage format is all screwed up.
Here your lack of knowledge gets you. The CD is designed to be a cheap way to accomplish mass distribution of identical bulk data. Mass production is accomplished by stamping the CDs using a press. This works very well, but it means that small-use applications -- that is, recordable CDs -- get tricky. You have to sustain a continuous data stream to to write laser, or you will stall and ruin the disc. This is a trade off you have to make if you want cheap mass production (of both software and music). It is not a design error.
I'd like to see DVD's go the way of 8-track tapes. The whole idea was wrong from the start.
I disagree. The idea of DVD is a good one. Put a whole movie in high-quality digital format, with professional sound and interactive features, on a high-capacity compact disc that can also hold arbitrary data for computers. Sounds like the Compact Disc, Stage Two. Great idea!
Then a bunch of blood-sucking lawyers and money-grubbing corporations got wind of it, and decided that they could Make The World A Better Place (for them) by loading it up with cheap copy protection schemes. Rather like those annoying key disks from 1980s IBM-PC software, it didn't do much to stop copying, but made everything a whole lot more difficult for the people who actually want to legitimately use the thing.
If DVD had turned out like the original CD -- just a media, not a copyright law enforcement agency -- I think everyone would have been better off, the DVD Forum included.
You assert an Internet petition to show support would be worthless. I don't agree. Now, I don't think a simple petition is going to make all our problems go away. But it will serve to do a number of things. For starters, it will give *us* an idea of just how many people actually do care. Such a number is useful in discussions and debates. Any movement to sign a petition will likely raise public awareness -- always a good thing.
Furthermore, a strong showing of support through such a petition might help our cause. It would be useful evidence if "harm to consumers" is a factor in the court, as it sometimes is. If we get a large enough response, it may get some attention in the industry. Large companies do not like to lose customers, and if they see a large amount of consumer awareness and concern, they may reconsider things. You raise the point that the DVD Forum holds a monopoly; a large consumer movement may bring anti-trust scrutiny to bear on the DVD Forum, and that is the *last* thing they want.
Do I know for sure that a petition will cause these things to happen? Of course not. But I think such a petition gives you a good return on very little investment, and would be worth trying.
Like most of the people in the world, I do not live anywhere near California. So I cannot go to the court house to protest it.
So, I want to know: Is there anything the rest of us can do to support the opposition to the repression of the DVD Forum? Can we start an Internet petition to indicate our support? Something along the lines of the Blue Ribbon Campaign of the EFF?
Are people contacting their local news agencies, and explaining why the DVD Forum is in the wrong?
Is there an address (snail mail) at the DVD Forum we can write to complain? (I want snail mail because email is ignored too easily.)
The DVD Forum will only win if this stays small. A hundred thousand angry consumers will fold them right quick.
We need to move on this, people.
How many of you really watch movies on your computer?
That is not the issue here. The issues are:
- Can we legitimately try to implement such a player if we want to?
- Can we talk about that implementation?
- Can we link to it?
By posting about it here, by the way, you are covered in the restraining order. You just involved yourself in the legal fight.
Now do you understand why this is so serious?
Jon "Maddog" Hall != John T. Hall.
The fact that (maddog != JohnTHall) does not mean that (maddog.employer != VALinux). Jon Hall is "Director of Linux Evangelism" at VA Linux Systems; you can email him there at maddog@valinux.com.
Am I the only one who thought of a "exotic dancers" with computer chips covering the important parts of their breasts (instead of stars or whatever)?
I doubt he knows much about life at VA Linux...
I might say, "Learn to check your facts!"
From maddog's signature:
Director of Linux Evangelism
VA Linux Systems
1382 Bordeaux Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
maddog@valinux.com
In fact, most of the email he sends to GNHLUG as of late comes from his VA Linux address.
So, maddog, now that VA Linux has gone public, what are you going to do with all that money you made in the IPO? ;-)
(To the readership: The above is a joke. maddog says that if you think you have trouble with spam, try being mistaken for a newly rich VP at VA Linux.)
Why should I, as a potential product designer, want to release my code if the potential exists for misuse?
:-)
You are going to release your code one way or the other, regardless. If you release the source code under a generous, open source license, then everybody will benefit. If you release just the binary, with a restrictive license, then only those willing to ignore your license, break the law, and reverse engineer your program will benefit. (And if you don't release anything, nobody benefits.)
Security through obscurity never works. If your argument is that not releasing the source code is a serious roadblock to the crackers in the world, that is naive, I'm sorry.
But I too want USB and not serial interface. So I've decided to wait for a Visor...
The Visor is a real neat device. The "Springboard" is one step removed from PCMCIA in a Palm Pilot, and I think that is great.
However, the Visor does have one problem, what I consider a fatal flaw: It uses regular ROM to store the OS. Not flash ROM. This means you are locked into the version of PalmOS that ships with the Visor. 3.1, I think. This really sucks.
You may not care, but it is definiately something to be aware of.