What exactly *is* the conflict between the GPL and the App Store T&Cs, anyway? The FSF have a piece up that talks about the "only install app on five devices limit" but I think that's a red herring -- AFAIK you can only sync iTunes DRM content (i.e. movies and music) on five computers, but iOS apps can be installed on limitless devices attached to an iTunes account. And the company who ported VLC, Applidium, were hosting a full download of the VLC app source on their own site. I can't really see the difference between this and, say, a Netgear router firmware where the company hosts a download for the source; in both that case and the VLC app, the user gets a binary file, and can optionally grab the source and compile the binary themselves and run it (in an emulator, admittedly, in the case of the iOS app, but you're still running it. Pretty sure the GPL distribution clause doesn't have to target the exact same platform, does it?)
What am I missing, if anything? What exactly is it that blocks GPL on the App Store?
I bet that is the case, yes. I do know that if your BT phone line defaults to not sending caller line ID, you need to tell the Sky box the call prefix to make it come back on for the dial out call -- the entire system is literally tied to the caller ID and nothing else. If you have Multiroom it's strictly non-negoitable, you must have a phone line, it must be plugged in, it must send caller ID.
I also strongly suspect this is why they still use a built-in modem and not the Ethernet port. It'd clearly be preferable in this day and age to just wireless hook the Sky box to your free wireless Sky router, but they couldn't then guarantee the two Multiroom cards were at the same address. It'd be too easy for me to sell you my second card and use some manner of IP tunnel to ensure that when your box connects out, it does so from my address. Sky are none the wiser, except they've just lost half their rental revenue.
You're half right. They have analogue modems in, yes, but the box itself doesn't give a monkeys if it's plugged in or not. My SkyHD has never been plugged in and has been working A-OK for months. The box tries to dial out at 3am each day and silently fails.
Time was, if they scanned their server logs and noticed your box hadn't dialled in for a while, they wrote you a letter and shouted at you. This is because they log all your TV watching habits and sell them on to a ad firm who are a wholly owned subsidary of News Corp; you can escape that clause by paying £25 but Sky don't seem to enforce this any more. I've had no contact from them in months.
Finally, there is Multiroom, where you can rent a second Sky card (with all the same channels as your primary card) at a steep discount as long as you keep them at the same address. Here Sky do care about the dialup, as they use the caller ID logs on the call requests in to make sure you haven't sold your second content card on to a mate. They get very unhappy if you unplug a multiroom box from the phone line.
In any event, the dialup plays no part in the content decryption.
It's only two seconds work to cut a steering wheel if you have a four foot pair of bolt cutters with you. Serious car thieves might -- joyriders probably won't, if only because wandering around .
As another child of this post points out, most crooklocks ("club"s to you USAers, I think) have crummy locks that can be popped with a screwdriver. When I drove an Astra GTE and lived in a crummy part of Cardiff, I bought 5 foot of chunky chain and a decent padlock from a DIY shop for less than a low-end crooklock. I looped it under the passenger seat and twice around the steering wheel, including around the central spoke. You could get it off by cutting it or the lock (downright unfeasible), taking the passenger seat out (takes a long time) or attacking the wheel itself (the only you'd ever get it).
Plus, the way I looped it meant you had to cut the wheel in three places to get the chain off. I suspect that if you did, the rest of it would actually fall apart and the car would be undriveable anyway. My housemate's Metro GTA was stolen five times that year, my Astra was never touched. I put it down the chain.
(Interestingly, his Metro had a hidden switch that disabled the petrol pump, so they never got further than the end of the road. He had to fork out for new locks/windows a few times though.)
There is a for-real car security product, a high-end alternative to crook locks (clubs to you Yankees) that relies on this. The steering column has a special boss attached that will clip into your wheel and your wheel only; you simply unclip it and take the wheel with you.
Clumsy -- you have to carry a wheel around! -- but effective.
Clearly, this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
(Hell, everyone's already taken all the cool zero-button-mouse comments. What else is a ten-minutes-behind-the-times laggard like me to do for cheap karma, huh? Huh?
...and an ex-colleague of mine works there. Every so often, he spends a day wandering around fields testing the location based stuff out.
They seem like a pretty bright bunch of folks. I've been meaning to go up there at some point and have a play with one of these gadgets, but I haven't found the time yet. Anyway, apparantly, it all Just Works.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. I only started at the firm eight months back (my first post-PhD job, I was a Perl developer before that). The project I'm working on has been in development, on and off, for nearly five years so it predates most of the really snazzy frameworks. It has all these little home-grown bits and bobs for HTML templating and logging and database persistence and suchlike. Which, naturally, aren't anywhere near as good as what's out there but there's no time to fix that, so whaddyagonnado?
Having read the article quite closely, actually, I don't think he had an agenda. I just think he did it backwards. He took his SUSE 9 system and looked at what versions of MySQL and GCC it had. Then he built GCC for the OS X machine, then used that to build MySQL. He probably felt really good about that being a fair test, too! After all, the software was the same on all machines!
He'd have done better to use OS X Server with the shipped MySQL, of course, as your source points out. Apple's platform isn't fully mainstream for either GCC or MySQL, and it's hardly unfair to allow Apple's own tweaks to these packages to be used in the test. It's still a pretty real-world test he's doing, so it's not like it can be cheated.
Maybe it was deliberate bias, but I try not to suspect evil when simple incompetence can explain it.
Interesting stuff, particularly as Anandtech has been pretty pro-Apple lately... Anand himself has bought and reviewed Powermacs and Powerbooks and been very positive about the whole switcher thing. How weird.
I'm not enough of a Big Iron guy to know if there's rampant holes in these benchmarks or not, but this benchmark set at Anandtech (and other pages in that article) suggests the Mach kernel in OS X isn't the greatest for high end server stuff. So is this the smartest move Apple could make?
As for the viability of WebObjects, well... I'm currently a J2EE developer working with in-house libraries. Once I get my thesis written I'm going to spend some time with one of the next generation web development platforms; either some more Java libraries (Spring/Webwork/Hibernate), Rails, or Seaside. I'm afraid WebObjects is a good long way down my list, and I'm a daily OS X user! I'd maybe have thought about it if I could have rolled out onto Tomcat, but now I can't, well, it appeals to me even less.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke.
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." Gregory Benford.
And now to drag my tenuous post back to some semblence of the topic, I agree with Mark -- there is no strong division between sci-fi and fantasy, and there are plenty of things (e.g. the Shadowrun RPG) that manage to be both at once.
(There, that should keep the mods happy...)
Power consumption and price comparison
on
NSLU2 Now More Useful
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Lots of people are claiming that this is much cheaper to run than a dedicated ATX server, but they are forgetting you need to power the hard disks too. In my (limited) experience, powering desktop 7200rpm disks from USB is very dicey, so you need externally powered hard disk boxes for them.
Based on UK prices turned up in 30 seconds by Google, so probably not the cheapest to be had, but never mind.
NSLU2: £60, 5V/2A power into device
Cheap USB hard disk box:£35, 50-80VA power into the PSU brick (based on the one on my desk). I'll use 70VA, to be on the safe side.
So, outfitting one of these for two hard disks would cost around £130. Assume a 60% efficiency plugpack for the NSLU2 (which seems conservative) and total power consumption would then be around 160VA.
In comparison, my server has an Athlon 900Mhz, a couple of fans, the same two hard disks, and a 300W PSU. Let's assume it's highly loaded and actually draws around 250VA; I'll ignore power correction factor for these calculations.
At 10p/kWh, the NSLU2 costs 39p per day to run, and the server 60p. If I upgraded to the NSLU2, it would take over 3 years to get a ROI from a purely financial point of view. Unless I've gotten something wrong, in which case I'm sure some clever slashdotter will correct me in a few seconds:o)
So, on purely financial grounds, perhaps hard to justify. Still, it's nifty, it's a hell of a lot smaller than my existing server, and it would reduce the noise in this room nicely by eliminated a few fans too.
Update: hmmm, PC guide reckons it's more like 10W for a hard disk under use, suggesting the rather high sounding 50-80VA max draw are probably for 10,000rpm disks spinning up or something. Even assuming 15W to be on the safe side changes things around a lot; assume 75% efficient PSU plugpacks just to look on the bright side, and we get 20W per hard disk and 13W for the device = 13p per day. Break even is now about 9 months; not too shabby, given the other benefits.
A friend of mine once got talking to a TV detector guy in the pub (yeah, I know, sounds very bogus but stick with me here; this does make sense). He said the detector van is almost a myth and they catch 95% of scofflaws by legwork, i.e. writing them scary letters, going to their house, and looking in through the curtains. This is much cheaper than a detector van. They also log the names and addresses of anyone who buys a TV; this then gets cross-referenced against the database.
Makes sense to me. I've occasionally gone a month without renewing my licence, partially to see what would happen, and no hellfire landed about me.
Forgot to mention: of course, here in the UK we can at least feel smug about the BBC as we pay our annual Television Tax. Which is good... uhh, I think.
Now, I don't like advert breaks and I don't like the rampant commercialism they imply, but seriously: isn't this going to make a lot of TV unprofitable? So what happens now? Will less TV be made? Will good shows magically suceed and only bad shows not get made (fat chance)? Or will the overall proportion of "World's Blankiest Blank" shows increase (seems likely)?
Perhaps DVD box sets are the answer.. but then again, if the only money was in the DVD release, why do TV at all? And anyway, Futurama sells by the truckload and that still got cancelled. I suspect the real answer is "new and insidious advertising methods". Hurrah for FCC-approved "cannot skip" bits, coming soon to a digital TV adbreak near you! And hurrah too for product placement! You must buy Pepsi, because Joey Tribbiani does!
Not that I can see a way to put this genie back in the bottle, admittedly. Ah well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what whacky adventures come next.
I ran across these nifty devices a few weeks back but the UK release timescale was horrific -- mid 2004, I think I read. Does anyone have any firm information on when it might be, and why they aren't available right now?
Re:Question for those of you who have these things
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 1
I struggle to manage 4x burns across my network, which is admittedly probably more to do with a cheap switch than anything else. Judging by my experiences with 52x CD-R burns, I would suggest an 8x burn is going to give most PCs a real workout. I'd rather reduce the burn speed than watch it bounce off the bottom of it's buffer whilst the BURN-proof light flickers merrily away...
I beg to differ. My iBook G3 800 was running 7B85 and refreshed to 10.3.1 absolutely fine. I'm having some issues with the machine not going to sleep when I shut the lid, but those were there under 7B85 and I suspect it's hardware anyway.
I watched it too, and I have a bottle of Dave's Loony Juice in my fridge downstairs. My eyes bugged out of my head when he poured an entire capful of it into his mouth. I bet he was paying for that for hours afterward.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly *is* the conflict between the GPL and the App Store T&Cs, anyway? The FSF have a piece up that talks about the "only install app on five devices limit" but I think that's a red herring -- AFAIK you can only sync iTunes DRM content (i.e. movies and music) on five computers, but iOS apps can be installed on limitless devices attached to an iTunes account. And the company who ported VLC, Applidium, were hosting a full download of the VLC app source on their own site. I can't really see the difference between this and, say, a Netgear router firmware where the company hosts a download for the source; in both that case and the VLC app, the user gets a binary file, and can optionally grab the source and compile the binary themselves and run it (in an emulator, admittedly, in the case of the iOS app, but you're still running it. Pretty sure the GPL distribution clause doesn't have to target the exact same platform, does it?)
What am I missing, if anything? What exactly is it that blocks GPL on the App Store?
I bet that is the case, yes. I do know that if your BT phone line defaults to not sending caller line ID, you need to tell the Sky box the call prefix to make it come back on for the dial out call -- the entire system is literally tied to the caller ID and nothing else. If you have Multiroom it's strictly non-negoitable, you must have a phone line, it must be plugged in, it must send caller ID.
I also strongly suspect this is why they still use a built-in modem and not the Ethernet port. It'd clearly be preferable in this day and age to just wireless hook the Sky box to your free wireless Sky router, but they couldn't then guarantee the two Multiroom cards were at the same address. It'd be too easy for me to sell you my second card and use some manner of IP tunnel to ensure that when your box connects out, it does so from my address. Sky are none the wiser, except they've just lost half their rental revenue.
You're half right. They have analogue modems in, yes, but the box itself doesn't give a monkeys if it's plugged in or not. My SkyHD has never been plugged in and has been working A-OK for months. The box tries to dial out at 3am each day and silently fails.
Time was, if they scanned their server logs and noticed your box hadn't dialled in for a while, they wrote you a letter and shouted at you. This is because they log all your TV watching habits and sell them on to a ad firm who are a wholly owned subsidary of News Corp; you can escape that clause by paying £25 but Sky don't seem to enforce this any more. I've had no contact from them in months.
Finally, there is Multiroom, where you can rent a second Sky card (with all the same channels as your primary card) at a steep discount as long as you keep them at the same address. Here Sky do care about the dialup, as they use the caller ID logs on the call requests in to make sure you haven't sold your second content card on to a mate. They get very unhappy if you unplug a multiroom box from the phone line.
In any event, the dialup plays no part in the content decryption.
It's only two seconds work to cut a steering wheel if you have a four foot pair of bolt cutters with you. Serious car thieves might -- joyriders probably won't, if only because wandering around .
As another child of this post points out, most crooklocks ("club"s to you USAers, I think) have crummy locks that can be popped with a screwdriver. When I drove an Astra GTE and lived in a crummy part of Cardiff, I bought 5 foot of chunky chain and a decent padlock from a DIY shop for less than a low-end crooklock. I looped it under the passenger seat and twice around the steering wheel, including around the central spoke. You could get it off by cutting it or the lock (downright unfeasible), taking the passenger seat out (takes a long time) or attacking the wheel itself (the only you'd ever get it).
Plus, the way I looped it meant you had to cut the wheel in three places to get the chain off. I suspect that if you did, the rest of it would actually fall apart and the car would be undriveable anyway. My housemate's Metro GTA was stolen five times that year, my Astra was never touched. I put it down the chain.
(Interestingly, his Metro had a hidden switch that disabled the petrol pump, so they never got further than the end of the road. He had to fork out for new locks/windows a few times though.)
There is a for-real car security product, a high-end alternative to crook locks (clubs to you Yankees) that relies on this. The steering column has a special boss attached that will clip into your wheel and your wheel only; you simply unclip it and take the wheel with you.
Clumsy -- you have to carry a wheel around! -- but effective.
Clearly, this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
(Hell, everyone's already taken all the cool zero-button-mouse comments. What else is a ten-minutes-behind-the-times laggard like me to do for cheap karma, huh? Huh?
...and an ex-colleague of mine works there. Every so often, he spends a day wandering around fields testing the location based stuff out.
They seem like a pretty bright bunch of folks. I've been meaning to go up there at some point and have a play with one of these gadgets, but I haven't found the time yet. Anyway, apparantly, it all Just Works.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. I only started at the firm eight months back (my first post-PhD job, I was a Perl developer before that). The project I'm working on has been in development, on and off, for nearly five years so it predates most of the really snazzy frameworks. It has all these little home-grown bits and bobs for HTML templating and logging and database persistence and suchlike. Which, naturally, aren't anywhere near as good as what's out there but there's no time to fix that, so whaddyagonnado?
Having read the article quite closely, actually, I don't think he had an agenda. I just think he did it backwards. He took his SUSE 9 system and looked at what versions of MySQL and GCC it had. Then he built GCC for the OS X machine, then used that to build MySQL. He probably felt really good about that being a fair test, too! After all, the software was the same on all machines!
He'd have done better to use OS X Server with the shipped MySQL, of course, as your source points out. Apple's platform isn't fully mainstream for either GCC or MySQL, and it's hardly unfair to allow Apple's own tweaks to these packages to be used in the test. It's still a pretty real-world test he's doing, so it's not like it can be cheated.
Maybe it was deliberate bias, but I try not to suspect evil when simple incompetence can explain it.
Interesting stuff, particularly as Anandtech has been pretty pro-Apple lately... Anand himself has bought and reviewed Powermacs and Powerbooks and been very positive about the whole switcher thing. How weird.
Anyway, thanks for the info!
I'm not enough of a Big Iron guy to know if there's rampant holes in these benchmarks or not, but this benchmark set at Anandtech (and other pages in that article) suggests the Mach kernel in OS X isn't the greatest for high end server stuff. So is this the smartest move Apple could make?
As for the viability of WebObjects, well... I'm currently a J2EE developer working with in-house libraries. Once I get my thesis written I'm going to spend some time with one of the next generation web development platforms; either some more Java libraries (Spring/Webwork/Hibernate), Rails, or Seaside. I'm afraid WebObjects is a good long way down my list, and I'm a daily OS X user! I'd maybe have thought about it if I could have rolled out onto Tomcat, but now I can't, well, it appeals to me even less.
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." Gregory Benford.
And now to drag my tenuous post back to some semblence of the topic, I agree with Mark -- there is no strong division between sci-fi and fantasy, and there are plenty of things (e.g. the Shadowrun RPG) that manage to be both at once.
(There, that should keep the mods happy...)
Lots of people are claiming that this is much cheaper to run than a dedicated ATX server, but they are forgetting you need to power the hard disks too. In my (limited) experience, powering desktop 7200rpm disks from USB is very dicey, so you need externally powered hard disk boxes for them.
:o)
Based on UK prices turned up in 30 seconds by Google, so probably not the cheapest to be had, but never mind.
NSLU2: £60, 5V/2A power into device
Cheap USB hard disk box:£35, 50-80VA power into the PSU brick (based on the one on my desk). I'll use 70VA, to be on the safe side.
So, outfitting one of these for two hard disks would cost around £130. Assume a 60% efficiency plugpack for the NSLU2 (which seems conservative) and total power consumption would then be around 160VA.
In comparison, my server has an Athlon 900Mhz, a couple of fans, the same two hard disks, and a 300W PSU. Let's assume it's highly loaded and actually draws around 250VA; I'll ignore power correction factor for these calculations.
At 10p/kWh, the NSLU2 costs 39p per day to run, and the server 60p. If I upgraded to the NSLU2, it would take over 3 years to get a ROI from a purely financial point of view. Unless I've gotten something wrong, in which case I'm sure some clever slashdotter will correct me in a few seconds
So, on purely financial grounds, perhaps hard to justify. Still, it's nifty, it's a hell of a lot smaller than my existing server, and it would reduce the noise in this room nicely by eliminated a few fans too.
Update: hmmm, PC guide reckons it's more like 10W for a hard disk under use, suggesting the rather high sounding 50-80VA max draw are probably for 10,000rpm disks spinning up or something. Even assuming 15W to be on the safe side changes things around a lot; assume 75% efficient PSU plugpacks just to look on the bright side, and we get 20W per hard disk and 13W for the device = 13p per day. Break even is now about 9 months; not too shabby, given the other benefits.
Hmmmmm....
0 9ab4365ff25 alien.swarm_1.0-english.run1 db0ee97af4f7c95 alien.swarm_1.0-english.run ./alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
[~]$ md5sum alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
81a8f7e45c7a5e9cdb9e
[~]$ cat alien.swarm_1.0-english.run.md5
2a372dcfae462105
[~]$ sh
Verifying archive integrity...Error in MD5 checksums: bcc7daefa6fb3c0a04789b9419afd7ff is different from c4fb1c402cd02027e3392292efa1538e
Charming! Four different md5sums. Wassup, doc? I'm just going to get the tar.bz2 from BitTorrent, I think.
Typical, my modpoints expired unused yesterday and then I find this gem at (score 1).
Sorry. I like quiet computing, but you'll have to prise my IBM Model M out of my cold, dead hands!
A friend of mine once got talking to a TV detector guy in the pub (yeah, I know, sounds very bogus but stick with me here; this does make sense). He said the detector van is almost a myth and they catch 95% of scofflaws by legwork, i.e. writing them scary letters, going to their house, and looking in through the curtains. This is much cheaper than a detector van. They also log the names and addresses of anyone who buys a TV; this then gets cross-referenced against the database.
Makes sense to me. I've occasionally gone a month without renewing my licence, partially to see what would happen, and no hellfire landed about me.
Forgot to mention: of course, here in the UK we can at least feel smug about the BBC as we pay our annual Television Tax. Which is good... uhh, I think.
Now, I don't like advert breaks and I don't like the rampant commercialism they imply, but seriously: isn't this going to make a lot of TV unprofitable? So what happens now? Will less TV be made? Will good shows magically suceed and only bad shows not get made (fat chance)? Or will the overall proportion of "World's Blankiest Blank" shows increase (seems likely)?
Perhaps DVD box sets are the answer.. but then again, if the only money was in the DVD release, why do TV at all? And anyway, Futurama sells by the truckload and that still got cancelled. I suspect the real answer is "new and insidious advertising methods". Hurrah for FCC-approved "cannot skip" bits, coming soon to a digital TV adbreak near you! And hurrah too for product placement! You must buy Pepsi, because Joey Tribbiani does!
Not that I can see a way to put this genie back in the bottle, admittedly. Ah well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what whacky adventures come next.
I ran across these nifty devices a few weeks back but the UK release timescale was horrific -- mid 2004, I think I read. Does anyone have any firm information on when it might be, and why they aren't available right now?
I struggle to manage 4x burns across my network, which is admittedly probably more to do with a cheap switch than anything else. Judging by my experiences with 52x CD-R burns, I would suggest an 8x burn is going to give most PCs a real workout. I'd rather reduce the burn speed than watch it bounce off the bottom of it's buffer whilst the BURN-proof light flickers merrily away...
I beg to differ. My iBook G3 800 was running 7B85 and refreshed to 10.3.1 absolutely fine. I'm having some issues with the machine not going to sleep when I shut the lid, but those were there under 7B85 and I suspect it's hardware anyway.
I watched it too, and I have a bottle of Dave's Loony Juice in my fridge downstairs. My eyes bugged out of my head when he poured an entire capful of it into his mouth. I bet he was paying for that for hours afterward.
It claims to do for file servers what Smoothwall does for firewalls. It looks nifty, although I confess I've yet to try it out myself.