So, we're supposed to just accept your word that all important advances come about only because of patents... Whatever.
Patents do speed products to market, because a company doesn't have to develop a product, and enough units to flood the market, in secrecy, but the same development would be going on.
Patents might have helped with open protocols, because the protocol could be disclosed without it being freely used in ways the company didn't want, but then MS doesn't patent the Word file formats, they obscure them and change them regularly.
That's something patents should be making open, and they're not. It's sufficient cause to reexamine the whole argument of, "patents advanced discovery much faster".
We only need lawyers because we've given them influence over the years and they've twisted our legal system into something that can't be understood without years of university training.
If we hadn't allowed people with an agenda to 'help' create laws, we wouldn't need lawyers to conduct everyday business.
You wouldn't consult pedophiles on daycare design and security procedures, similarly it's a bad idea to consult lawyers on design of legal systems.
Remember the earlier thread, on patents, where is was mentioned that having a non-lawyer look at patent claims was a very good way to get ruled against, because the current legal opinion was that only lawyers are capable of determining infringement?
Judges are nearly all (in Canada, they're ALL) lawyers, and most politicians, probably 75%, are lawyers. It's not suprising they've twisted everything, applying complex rules that require lawyers.
Yeah, and that corp will get a molotov cocktail tossed through a front window at night, while the person they recently pissed off has an airtight alibi. Problem solved.
If you cheat, by buying your way through the courty system, walking over people, they will fight back. And they won't do it with expensive lawyers.
And, it's be hard to really get upset at the vigilante justice... "Tasty, yet morally ambiguous."
I write stuff like this for work, and it's not 'hard' work, as in, brain teaser type stuff, but it's slow and tedious.
The problem is that you need to test this once done, and you either go through, meticulously, rule by rule, checking everything dependant on that rule, or you enter saved examples, and compare the values the program returns to what was generated by another program, or by hand-calculating it.
Tiny errors, especially in the conditionals (You're allowed this write-off if your wage is under X, and you're single, or married with three or more kids, etc...) are nearly impossible to catch, especially when two or more conditionals modify the same value.
It is possible to write, especially for yourself, where you can ignore certain segments of tax law, like the spousal section if you're single, but the testing involved would make it easier to just do it by hand.
Re:Large amount of artwork? Umm...
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Quake 1 GPL'ed
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· Score: 2
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
Id released their own code. As such, they aren't bound by the terms of the license, only the users are.
This means that they could GPL every second line of the code, and release the rest under a look-but-don't-use license, and it wouldn't become GPL. Only things you linked to the GPLed bits would be GPL.
Also, the GPL only applies to the application source. The levels, graphics, and sounds aren't included. They aren't needed to have the application. This is like GPLing a word processor and expecting that any documents produced with it would be GPLed.
Re:Idea: Bring RMS and Theo de Raadt together!
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RMS The Coder
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· Score: 2
Sure, but Theo just maintains a distro of BSD and audits a bunch of code.
When he's written a whole C compiler from scratch, along with a goodly hunk of the OS support coded, then he'll be that much more 'difficult' but he's also have earned the right.
The GPL is basically a 'place' to put code you think will benefit people. You have to have written the code, or have it already given to the free world, such as with a BSD or public domain license.
If someone can't make a living because all the code they'd write exists in better form under the GPL, then perhaps they don't deserve to make a living as a programmer.
And the GPL doesn't even prevent you from making money, it just means you need to sell yourself as a glue programmer, and a systems integrator, instead of just a programmer.
Anyone can sell GPLed code, and charge to set it up, they just can't slap their own copyright on it. And for everyone except those with an irrational need to own everything, this is enough.
When people whine about the GPL, all they show is that they can't get by without stealing code, and they don't want to be forced to show this.
From reading the other posts, about RMS living as if the community is trustworthy, except when he's forced to do otherwise, because you should trust the community, etc... I got a different view of his beliefs.
Most people think of communism (discounting rabid people who think USSR == Communism) as sort of a global welfare state, where you can sit around and get by, or strive and strive and be held back.
But, if you had a mature community, this wouldn't happen. The same as, in a mature society, like that which Stallman grew up in at MIT, where he could leave his email unpassworded and not lose it.
In a mature society, you could leave your doors open, because everyone would be, if not rich, then at least, not poor. You could leave your email open because people wouldn't trash your machine just to prove a point.
I think RMS honestly lives by the golden rule, treat others as you would have them treat you. He wants open code, so he opens his code. He doesn't want nasty controlling laws, so he promotes ways around these laws, GPG for example.
I'm not saying he's Jesus or anything, but he seems to have decided on what he feels he has to do to live a moral life, and he's doing it, with few contradictions. To see this, you just need to see what his goals are.
Ebert didn't get much right. The big problem is that he compares prototype, proof-of-concept systems, with the best of the film systems, and assumes that nothing can get better.
I'll address his points one by one, pointing out the errors.
But how good is digital projection?
Here's the first and probably biggest mistake. He doesn't realize that technology is changing. The proper question is, "How good is digital projection NOW?" In a few years, it'll be bigger, better, and cheaper.
its inventors claim, 500 percent better.
One wonders how they came up with this number. Is watching a movie five times better on their system?
And it can handle any existing 35mm film format--unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints.
Here's a pointless and barely accurate statement. How often does a theatre show a print that's twenty years old? Very rarely, because by that age they're brittle and faded. This is if the prints happen to be lying around. It's very unlikely there'd be many old films for a projector to display.
Estimates for the Texas Instruments digital projector range from $110,000 to $150,000 per screen.
Sure, the upfront cost of a new system is higher. So we should never upgrade anything by this logic. I mean, fixing an old car is almost always cheaper than getting a new one, even if it'll break down sooner and cost tons more to run.
Digital systems are prototypes now, and are thus more expensive, but they'll get cheaper, and promise free or very nearly free delivery. The updated film system requires more film, making shipping even costlier and doesn't offer a future reduction in cost, like digital does.
The source of their signal is an array of 20 prerecorded 18-gigabyte hard drives, trucked to each theater. This array costs an additional $75,000, apart from the cost of trucking and installation.
A 400GB array costs $75k? Well, even assuming this was true, the cost would come down drastically over the next few years. Twenty drives and a server will end up being two drives, easily shipped.
Even so, a movie is so memory-intensive that these arrays must compress the digital signal by a ratio of 4-1.
And the promlem with compressing the signal is?? 4:1 compression with a decent algorithm is barely noticable, especially if you don't have a hard limit of 1/4 the uncompressed bandwidth to stay under. (If the film is 100MB/sec, 25MB/sec is trivial to attain, if you can hit peaks of 50MB/sec... If 25MB/sec is the hard limit, as in, downloading over a link offering only that much bandwidth, it's a little bit harder.)
digital projection spokesmen said that in the real world, satellite downlinked movies would require 40-1 data compression.
This actually seems fairly accurate, but I don't imagine they'd use satellite downlinks, it doesn't make sense when they could simply run fiber to the theatre for a higher upfront, but negligible ongoing cost.
The picture on the screen would not be as good as the HDTV television sets now on sale in consumer electronics outlets! TI's MDD chip has specs of 1280 by 1024, while HDTV clocks at 1920 by 1080.
Here he compares the prototype systems with HDTV of the future, and the best HDTV of the future, 1920 being the highest of the resolutions, not the one that most broacasts will be in.
And then he misses the obvious point... If can can broadcast this HDTV signal, in higher quality than the digital projection, you'll probably have the technology for a higher resolution digital projection.
One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
And here we have the famous "Customizability is bad, because you're not as smart as we are, and if we say it's best this way, then don't fiddle."
Sure, some projectionist are probably color blind, but there are two things he missed, one is that the digital projector and the digital signal don't degrade or change, so you won't have to constantly fiddle to keep it in focus and bright enough. And if there are color controls, what's to keep them from sticking a sensor behind the screen to read the displayed colors and making the adjustments automatically?
A technology isn't bad if it can be misused, his "tweaks are bad, because people have less taste than me" argument is like saying cars are bad because you can get them painted in ugly colors.
How much would the digital projection specialist be paid? The technicians operating the TI demo installations are paid more than the managers of most theaters.
No, really? The engineers travelling with the prototype systems are more highly paid than a young kid? Sheesh.
This assumes that the system need be so complex to operate that it requires a trained engineer. I can't imagine it being more complex than modern home-theatre... "Press this button to start it, and use these controls to tweak it. Hit this button to stop it if the bulb burns out." Do TV's require electrical-engineers with specialization in antenna theory to operate them?
If it does have any complex theatre-servicable parts, one technician could service the whole theatre, and would probably do something closer to swapping out a dead unit for later repair, than on-site service.
This also ignores the benefits of having only one projectionist instead of one per machine. When you have to fiddle with film, and be on hand to fix problems that crop up, you need one person per machine. When you simply press 'Start' and watch the screen on a video pickup watching for problems, you don't need to be right there, and can hit 'Start' on many movies at the same time.
One 'projectionist' (VJ?) and one tech would have to be cheaper than eight-ten projectionists as are required now.
They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
This show's he doesn't understand the technology. DVD encryption has fundamentally flawed because it was relying on untrusted (and untrustable) hardware to decrypt the DVD. It was only a matter of time before a key was grabbed, the Xing accident only made it easier.
A digital projector on the other hand, being manufactured by the movie industry, could be 'trusted', because it's the last step in the chain before shining the movie on the screen, and because they could use crypto in the only way it can really work, from one trusted and secure machine to another.
Actually, no. The projector itself would probably be the decryptor, and would be a sealed black-box (basically) given to the theatre by the movie companies, with which the transmission systems would communicate and agree upon a session key with public-key crypto. I doubt these would have an output labelled 'Dub pirate copy to disk'. And it's unlikely a trained tech, let alone a projectionist, could jury-rig one.
Pirates could bribe a projectionist to let them intercept the decoded signal.
Didn't he just finish telling us how you had to store this on a $75k system of 20 18GB HDs?
Either he expects the average pirate to carry around these huge $75k disk systems, or he expects the storage to get cheaper.
An MV48 print would be even harder to pirate than current films; it would not fit the equipment in any pirate lab.
So, by this logic, a digital system would be perfect. With trusted machines at both ends, with huge storage requirements, and with no similarity to custom hardware, the digital system should be much more resistant to piracy.
They set aside the aesthetic advantage that MaxiVision48 has over digital.
Wow, a refinement of an old technology, using special film, gives better quality than a prototype of a new technology. I'm in shock.
It's actually interesting to note that he does subscribe to the, 24fps is only good enough, not great, school of thought. Someone should transfer this to the undying "How many FPS are enough?" threads...
When they hear the magical term "digital" and are told their movies will whiz to theaters via satellite, they assume it's all part of the computer revolution and don't ask more questions.
Could it be because the costs of film reproduction and distribution and so high that avoiding this is well worth subsidising the theatre's purchase a new hardware?
Wouldn't it be great if first-run movies came out across the world at the same time, instead of other continents having to wait for North America to be done with the film before getting it, and even then, getting the used and scratched film, after months of use? Actually, this might partially solve the DVD region code problem, if movies could reasonably be played worldwide at the same time, they wouldn't need to restrict region 1 DVDs from working in foreign players just to artificially create an audience for the big-screen version.
Rainforest Cafes could put you in the jungle. NikeTown could put you on the court with Michael Jordan. No more million-dollar walls of video screens, but a $10,000 projector and a wall-sized picture.
This assumes that these companies can spare the space for a projection system, which requires having a unobstructed area between the projector and the wall... And that they can afford the film costs, with a projectionist the run the whole thing...
A wall of LCD screens will soon be incredibly cheap by comparison, especially because this application doesn't have problems with small join marks between screens, or higher number of dead pixels than would be salable on a laptop.
But, if you accept the word of a technology pundit with no technology skills, who urges you to buy into a dying system with incredibly high upkeep costs instead of looking to the future...
Inflating the stock price of a hardware company, an a small one at that, to nine billion dollars, is insane.
Making money is okay, but there's something sick about making more money in a day than thousands of people combined will make together in their lifetimes...
But, even still RMS isn't asking for a boycot of Redhat or VA. He wants a boycot on a company that's using software patents in a predatory manner.
You make excellent points. Consider this the longform equivalent of a +1 moderation.
I've often argued for a keyword based naming system for searching, where 'movies' 'reviews' pulls up a list of movie review sites, instead of having to use movies.com or moviereviews.com, which are a pain, don't necessarily provide the best service, and are limited, where few sites can exist with similar names.
Sites could be known by something like an IPv6 IP number, something that wouldn't like current IPs do. Then the IP to Names relationship would be like the yellow pages, where you use keywords to narrow down the search, and once you find a company, you 'bookmark' it by writing down (programming) the phone number.
This way, any number of sites can share the same category. If they pick obvious keywords only, their category gets found easier, but they're in a bigger list. But, no one site stands out based on having keywords that others can't have.
Today's situation is like being able to buy the 'Sex' or 'Entertainment' section of the yellow pages, so that you're the only company there.
Great, we imbue a token with some value, then when easy creation of that token becomes possible, we outlaw such creation instead of picking a new token?
So, pacific islanders should start massive projects to poison sea creatures with shells, to prevent the devaluation of a shell-based economy? And those people who use large carved stones for money, they should outlaw a hammer and chisel?
You know, it'd be easier to simply change the tokens we use. If paper is hard to copy, then use coins with a chip in them, or somehow printing into the paper of the bill. If that proves impractical, either use tokens of a real worth (ie, gold) or use digital tokens and drop the whole idea of physical cash.
But, don't outlaw basic tools, or cripple them, preventing us from creating many things, just because we might forge a token.
The only way to preserve the value of cash is to make the cash inherently valuable, or to pick a token that can't be copied. If the colors and design of the bills can change, why can't the basic type of money change?
I guess I could have been more clear. I considered a few radio and TV channels to be 'essential services' for broadcast where fiber isn't practical. But, with something like CBC bringing news and some entertainment, I think the rest of the airwaves are better used for something other than TV/Radio.
Personally, I consider Iridium and other global sat-phone services to be more of a public service than sattelite TV, if they both used the same bandwidth.
And, you can still get TV signals. When a decent downlink gets to 4mbit or so, a private TV feed is doable, in TV quality, after being MPEG2ed.
And, if the phone system was smart enough, everyone in the area who wanted to watch that program could, assuming it was a public feed, so that it would only be broadcast once.
The difference between video on demand over the air, and current broadcast being that with video on demand, the service is being requested, it's not being 'spammed' to everyone. And with small cells within a city, you could serve a virtually unlimited number of people with low-power cells, instead of wasting the whole spectrum on TV signals, regardless of who watches.
The OS is the one part that *must* be open source. If it's not, the whole house of cards might as well be built on prime Florida landfill.
> Come on, this is opinion, not fact.
Not at all.
I assume you'll agree that the OS is the base for the whole system. If the OS is crap, the systems is crap. If the OS is buggy, the system is buggy.
So, why don't you agree that if the OS is closed source, and unauditable, that the whole system gains those worst traits?
Using closed source security systems, with black-box encryption is a bad idea. You can't see the potential bugs, so you can't guard against them.
Why is an OS any less prone to this? In fact, using a security system (PGP, etc) on a closed source OS is insecure. You don't know if there's a way for processes to read the memory of other processes, or if buffer overruns or other easily audited bugs exist which could crash the system under heavy load.
This isn't an issue which is based on opinion. The more open the source, the more people who can find bugs.
Open source doesn't always mean GPL. And even in a GPLed project, the dev team doesn't always solicit code. About all we can agree upon is that open source is source that is readable by everyone.
An OS isn't the place for strange proprietary code, an OS is the place for well tested, frequently audited, stable, open, and trusted code.
And, why do we need another OS? Do I believe we've got the best we'll ever get?
No.
But, I don't believe some hand-coded closed source, non-protected memory OS is *ever* going to rival what we have. If this was a real protected mode OS, with a decent design spec addressing current concerns, and those of the future, I might give it a little credit.
But, V2 lacks so many features of what we'd consider a real OS that it doesn't even belong in the same ballpark as MS-DOS, let alone Linux, BSD, and even NT.
But, that car isn't built with a very finite public resource. When cars are built with in such a way that only 20-30 can operate within a certain area, then they might be comparable to radio signals.
I think that all signals transmitted through public airspace should immediately fall under a free distribution license. Different from public domain. In PD, the work is completely open, you could claim you wrote it and disto it under your own copyright. But with free distro rights on otherwise copyrighted work, as long as you didn't modify it, or claim ownership, etc, you'd be able to distribute it.
The airwaves are too valuable for things that have to be mobile, like cell phones, police radios, and the like, to waste them by letting people broadcast proprietary copyrighted and unredistributable works. I'd like to see all TV, radio, and internet, except for some public service radio channels, and internet via cellular, go to fiber soon.
The cellphone companies have the right idea. While they have lobbied for some laws against listening in on cell calls, they simply encrypted them. The smart thing to do, use technology instead of the law.
Anways, I don't think the idea of commercials as seperate entities is going to exist much longer, they're too easy to edit out with devices like a tivo. But how do you edit out the fact that Ms McBeal is drinking a coke and driving a lexus? This would drastically change the whole industry. When anyone watching Ally McBeal is seeing the ads, why will they want to limit distribution? In fact, they'll encourage it if they're smart. If you record a show, you'll see the same product placements later. They'll simply expand the nielson ratings to include time-shifted viewings and multiple viewings of taped material.
I've done my share of ASM disassembles, thank you. It's not as easy as all that. I mean, the instructions are there in front of you, and if it's on OS you can be fairly sure they aren't going to try to obfuscate, like a company writing copy protection might.
But, for something as powerful as an OS, and with as much potential to screw things up if it's not used right, it's not enough to trace through and NOP out a few instructions, you have to understand everything, including figuring out what all the variables are and naming them.
An assembler takes ASM instructions and lets you use labels, if you disassemble an exe (that has been stripped), those labels are gone.
Exactly. It's yet another OS, and it's not open source. (I'm taking your word for this, their site appears to be/.ed and I can't check to look for source.)
Bear with me on this. If an application isn't open source, only that application and the users of it will suffer. If an OS isn't open source, all applications and all users suffer.
The OS is the one part that *must* be open source. If it's not, the whole house of cards might as well be built on prime Florida landfill.
And, why do we need another OS? This one seems to have one benefit, it's the easiest way to ship some piece of software that just plans on taking over the hardware as soon as it's loaded. If I was writing software to turn a PC into a network diagnostic unit or a robotics control station for an automated drill, this would be fine.
But for anything else, the network effect is the biggest problem. When Linux came out, it had TCP/IP networking and was a unix-like. You could network it with other OSes and didn't have to learn a new OS paradigm to use it. Does this 37k OS support that?
And, why do we need a new OS? Seriously. If this doesn't offer any improvements (other than size and speed, but my Apple// booted in only four seconds, off of a floppy no less, and the OS was under 8k!) then why would people switch to it and code apps for it when they'd have to reinvent the wheel just to eventually be where we already are.
And then, even if they had a reason, why would they pick a closed source OS?
There will always be a certain ammount of 'fitness' simply because a project is open source, especially if it's GPLed or otherwise locked from becoming proprietary.
The OSS you know what's in it and know that it won't change in ways that make it less usefull.
If you're locking into NT, you never know what MS will do. They might 'break' major connectivity preventing some part of your project from working. Many businesses I know use unix for mailservers and other important machines, and NT to admin the lower-end user boxes. What if part of this was broken. You'd have to change how your department ran, or switch to a new OS.
If you were locked into Linux, this wouldn't happen. There's no incentive for Linus to change protocols to be less compatible with other OSes, and even if he wanted it, he's only the most prominent voice in the primary branch, many distros would simply 'patch' the imcompatibility and continue business as usual.
Similarly, any closed source software can be modified in ways that are detrimental to you and you can't do anything about it, especially if there are needed patches which are only in the new version. (Think NT and the killer service packs.)
I do low-end database work for a client who uses Paradox for compatibility with the Corel office suite, and at each new release we have to go through and fix a bunch of problems preventing our old programs from running on the new 'compatible' version. If this was an open project, this wouldn't happen.
(And yes, I believe you can be 'locked' into Linux, or unix at least (being as replacing unix with BSD or vice versa is fairly easy). Simply have a large number of critical apps working on it without better solutions in another OS. But I don't see it as being a bad OS to be locked into, if you must be locked into something.)
Is there a way to write to the VMWare image file from the host OS? I mean, could you read the files from the Zip with the host, write a VMWare virtual partion with the host, and then real the virtual HD from the guest OS?
Seems better than trying to do some strange hardware emulation with the parallel port.
IDE works great for slow CD-Rs... I wouldn't waste a Plextor 32/8/8 on it, but then, Plextor doesn't make IDE CD-Rs (that I know of).
But, if you spread devices out across IDE channels properly, you're fine. It takes more IRQs, but other than that...
Four IDE channels is two main HDs on their own, two secondary on a third, and CD devices on the fourth.
If you do mix CDs and HDs on the same channel, just use common sense. Don't put the burner and the HD with the ISOs on the same channel, etc.
It's a poor-man's SCSI, but if you have four or less (or eight or less with a board like the BP6/BE6) then it's really just as good.
Re:Some of these aren't so dumb!
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Dumb Laws
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· Score: 2
Yeah, I meant population, not area. But until Moose start buying CDs we won't have much clout in the music industry.
I've seen a lot of maps from the USA where the countries (Mexico and Canada) to either end just aren't there, there's a big hole between Alaska and Washington... Or worse, Alaska is moved down into the water off the Washington shore.
With visual aids like that in schools, it's not hard to understand the problems people can have.
But, in the thirty seconds it took me to read your message I thought of another way to do it that would catch a lot of people.
Include an image in the page, the URL of which contains a different ID for each person the email was sent to, but which returns the same picture.
The website records IPs and then if it gets a cookie set by one of the banner sites in some period of time it assumes it's the same person.
My solution would be that email have to include all the secondary files (images, etc) as attachments and load the local copies. So, unless the user clicks on a link (which would be passed to the webbrowser window) nothing external needs to be loaded.
I'd also recommend to anyone writing a browser that they not let any pluggins load from a page received in email without the user clicking a link.
Not loading cookies from anywhere except the domain in the location bar seems to be a good idea. (Otherwise all it takes even with a 'only load cookies from the open page' setting would be to open an invisible frame and load something in it.
If Quebec is 80% French speaking, then the stores which didn't cater to that population would quickly go out of business.
If they didn't, it shows that the language issue isn't as important as the politicians would have you believe.
This whole distinct society thing is crap. Grow up and quit whining. If everyone around you speaks English, then speak it yourself or at least don't cry when people don't want to speak to you.
There is a difference between a dumb law and one hopelessly outdated..
Maybe there is a good reason for keeping a donkey from sleeping in a bathtub and it's just that we don't own donkeys now (the average person) and so don't understand it.
A little history, just a line or two, would put this in context and make it a lot more interesting.
Then there are the good, or just not-bad laws that don't really need to be listed. If there's a practical reason for a law and it doesn't severely infringe on civil rights, it probably isn't interesting enough to bother listing.
The 'dumb laws' are the current ones that are still being enforced but for the wrong reasons. This list contains ones like the six or more women living in one house law.
Having laws sorted in these categories, dumb, outdated, and rational (removed from the site) would IMHO improve it a bit.
You might be able to solicit help from the Alt.folklore.urban people in tracking down some of the more oddball laws (see the AFU article on 'rule of thumb' mentioned earlier.)
Actually, having a section on laws that don't really exist but that most people think exist would be good too... Such as "A common misconception is that you were allowed to beat your wife with a stick not to exceed..." and some citations regarding this.
A site with that is one that I would browse for fun and refer people to, both for humor and to correct their misconceptions.
BTW, Moderators, mark Andy's post up, it's probably the most ontopic one on this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
So, we're supposed to just accept your word that all important advances come about only because of patents... Whatever.
Patents do speed products to market, because a company doesn't have to develop a product, and enough units to flood the market, in secrecy, but the same development would be going on.
Patents might have helped with open protocols, because the protocol could be disclosed without it being freely used in ways the company didn't want, but then MS doesn't patent the Word file formats, they obscure them and change them regularly.
That's something patents should be making open, and they're not. It's sufficient cause to reexamine the whole argument of, "patents advanced discovery much faster".
We only need lawyers because we've given them influence over the years and they've twisted our legal system into something that can't be understood without years of university training.
If we hadn't allowed people with an agenda to 'help' create laws, we wouldn't need lawyers to conduct everyday business.
You wouldn't consult pedophiles on daycare design and security procedures, similarly it's a bad idea to consult lawyers on design of legal systems.
Remember the earlier thread, on patents, where is was mentioned that having a non-lawyer look at patent claims was a very good way to get ruled against, because the current legal opinion was that only lawyers are capable of determining infringement?
Judges are nearly all (in Canada, they're ALL) lawyers, and most politicians, probably 75%, are lawyers. It's not suprising they've twisted everything, applying complex rules that require lawyers.
Yeah, and that corp will get a molotov cocktail tossed through a front window at night, while the person they recently pissed off has an airtight alibi. Problem solved.
If you cheat, by buying your way through the courty system, walking over people, they will fight back. And they won't do it with expensive lawyers.
And, it's be hard to really get upset at the vigilante justice... "Tasty, yet morally ambiguous."
Fairly hard.
I write stuff like this for work, and it's not 'hard' work, as in, brain teaser type stuff, but it's slow and tedious.
The problem is that you need to test this once done, and you either go through, meticulously, rule by rule, checking everything dependant on that rule, or you enter saved examples, and compare the values the program returns to what was generated by another program, or by hand-calculating it.
Tiny errors, especially in the conditionals (You're allowed this write-off if your wage is under X, and you're single, or married with three or more kids, etc...) are nearly impossible to catch, especially when two or more conditionals modify the same value.
It is possible to write, especially for yourself, where you can ignore certain segments of tax law, like the spousal section if you're single, but the testing involved would make it easier to just do it by hand.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
Id released their own code. As such, they aren't bound by the terms of the license, only the users are.
This means that they could GPL every second line of the code, and release the rest under a look-but-don't-use license, and it wouldn't become GPL. Only things you linked to the GPLed bits would be GPL.
Also, the GPL only applies to the application source. The levels, graphics, and sounds aren't included. They aren't needed to have the application. This is like GPLing a word processor and expecting that any documents produced with it would be GPLed.
Sure, but Theo just maintains a distro of BSD and audits a bunch of code.
When he's written a whole C compiler from scratch, along with a goodly hunk of the OS support coded, then he'll be that much more 'difficult' but he's also have earned the right.
The GPL is basically a 'place' to put code you think will benefit people. You have to have written the code, or have it already given to the free world, such as with a BSD or public domain license.
If someone can't make a living because all the code they'd write exists in better form under the GPL, then perhaps they don't deserve to make a living as a programmer.
And the GPL doesn't even prevent you from making money, it just means you need to sell yourself as a glue programmer, and a systems integrator, instead of just a programmer.
Anyone can sell GPLed code, and charge to set it up, they just can't slap their own copyright on it. And for everyone except those with an irrational need to own everything, this is enough.
When people whine about the GPL, all they show is that they can't get by without stealing code, and they don't want to be forced to show this.
From reading the other posts, about RMS living as if the community is trustworthy, except when he's forced to do otherwise, because you should trust the community, etc... I got a different view of his beliefs.
Most people think of communism (discounting rabid people who think USSR == Communism) as sort of a global welfare state, where you can sit around and get by, or strive and strive and be held back.
But, if you had a mature community, this wouldn't happen. The same as, in a mature society, like that which Stallman grew up in at MIT, where he could leave his email unpassworded and not lose it.
In a mature society, you could leave your doors open, because everyone would be, if not rich, then at least, not poor. You could leave your email open because people wouldn't trash your machine just to prove a point.
I think RMS honestly lives by the golden rule, treat others as you would have them treat you. He wants open code, so he opens his code. He doesn't want nasty controlling laws, so he promotes ways around these laws, GPG for example.
I'm not saying he's Jesus or anything, but he seems to have decided on what he feels he has to do to live a moral life, and he's doing it, with few contradictions. To see this, you just need to see what his goals are.
I'll address his points one by one, pointing out the errors.
Here's the first and probably biggest mistake. He doesn't realize that technology is changing. The proper question is, "How good is digital projection NOW?" In a few years, it'll be bigger, better, and cheaper.
One wonders how they came up with this number. Is watching a movie five times better on their system?
Here's a pointless and barely accurate statement. How often does a theatre show a print that's twenty years old? Very rarely, because by that age they're brittle and faded. This is if the prints happen to be lying around. It's very unlikely there'd be many old films for a projector to display.
Sure, the upfront cost of a new system is higher. So we should never upgrade anything by this logic. I mean, fixing an old car is almost always cheaper than getting a new one, even if it'll break down sooner and cost tons more to run.
Digital systems are prototypes now, and are thus more expensive, but they'll get cheaper, and promise free or very nearly free delivery. The updated film system requires more film, making shipping even costlier and doesn't offer a future reduction in cost, like digital does.
A 400GB array costs $75k? Well, even assuming this was true, the cost would come down drastically over the next few years. Twenty drives and a server will end up being two drives, easily shipped.
And the promlem with compressing the signal is?? 4:1 compression with a decent algorithm is barely noticable, especially if you don't have a hard limit of 1/4 the uncompressed bandwidth to stay under. (If the film is 100MB/sec, 25MB/sec is trivial to attain, if you can hit peaks of 50MB/sec... If 25MB/sec is the hard limit, as in, downloading over a link offering only that much bandwidth, it's a little bit harder.)
This actually seems fairly accurate, but I don't imagine they'd use satellite downlinks, it doesn't make sense when they could simply run fiber to the theatre for a higher upfront, but negligible ongoing cost.
Here he compares the prototype systems with HDTV of the future, and the best HDTV of the future, 1920 being the highest of the resolutions, not the one that most broacasts will be in.
And then he misses the obvious point... If can can broadcast this HDTV signal, in higher quality than the digital projection, you'll probably have the technology for a higher resolution digital projection.
And here we have the famous "Customizability is bad, because you're not as smart as we are, and if we say it's best this way, then don't fiddle."
Sure, some projectionist are probably color blind, but there are two things he missed, one is that the digital projector and the digital signal don't degrade or change, so you won't have to constantly fiddle to keep it in focus and bright enough. And if there are color controls, what's to keep them from sticking a sensor behind the screen to read the displayed colors and making the adjustments automatically?
A technology isn't bad if it can be misused, his "tweaks are bad, because people have less taste than me" argument is like saying cars are bad because you can get them painted in ugly colors.
No, really? The engineers travelling with the prototype systems are more highly paid than a young kid? Sheesh.
This assumes that the system need be so complex to operate that it requires a trained engineer. I can't imagine it being more complex than modern home-theatre... "Press this button to start it, and use these controls to tweak it. Hit this button to stop it if the bulb burns out." Do TV's require electrical-engineers with specialization in antenna theory to operate them?
If it does have any complex theatre-servicable parts, one technician could service the whole theatre, and would probably do something closer to swapping out a dead unit for later repair, than on-site service.
This also ignores the benefits of having only one projectionist instead of one per machine. When you have to fiddle with film, and be on hand to fix problems that crop up, you need one person per machine. When you simply press 'Start' and watch the screen on a video pickup watching for problems, you don't need to be right there, and can hit 'Start' on many movies at the same time.
One 'projectionist' (VJ?) and one tech would have to be cheaper than eight-ten projectionists as are required now.
This show's he doesn't understand the technology. DVD encryption has fundamentally flawed because it was relying on untrusted (and untrustable) hardware to decrypt the DVD. It was only a matter of time before a key was grabbed, the Xing accident only made it easier.
A digital projector on the other hand, being manufactured by the movie industry, could be 'trusted', because it's the last step in the chain before shining the movie on the screen, and because they could use crypto in the only way it can really work, from one trusted and secure machine to another.
Actually, no. The projector itself would probably be the decryptor, and would be a sealed black-box (basically) given to the theatre by the movie companies, with which the transmission systems would communicate and agree upon a session key with public-key crypto. I doubt these would have an output labelled 'Dub pirate copy to disk'. And it's unlikely a trained tech, let alone a projectionist, could jury-rig one.
Didn't he just finish telling us how you had to store this on a $75k system of 20 18GB HDs?
Either he expects the average pirate to carry around these huge $75k disk systems, or he expects the storage to get cheaper.
So, by this logic, a digital system would be perfect. With trusted machines at both ends, with huge storage requirements, and with no similarity to custom hardware, the digital system should be much more resistant to piracy.
Wow, a refinement of an old technology, using special film, gives better quality than a prototype of a new technology. I'm in shock.
It's actually interesting to note that he does subscribe to the, 24fps is only good enough, not great, school of thought. Someone should transfer this to the undying "How many FPS are enough?" threads...
Could it be because the costs of film reproduction and distribution and so high that avoiding this is well worth subsidising the theatre's purchase a new hardware?
Wouldn't it be great if first-run movies came out across the world at the same time, instead of other continents having to wait for North America to be done with the film before getting it, and even then, getting the used and scratched film, after months of use? Actually, this might partially solve the DVD region code problem, if movies could reasonably be played worldwide at the same time, they wouldn't need to restrict region 1 DVDs from working in foreign players just to artificially create an audience for the big-screen version.
This assumes that these companies can spare the space for a projection system, which requires having a unobstructed area between the projector and the wall... And that they can afford the film costs, with a projectionist the run the whole thing...
A wall of LCD screens will soon be incredibly cheap by comparison, especially because this application doesn't have problems with small join marks between screens, or higher number of dead pixels than would be salable on a laptop.
But, if you accept the word of a technology pundit with no technology skills, who urges you to buy into a dying system with incredibly high upkeep costs instead of looking to the future...
Inflating the stock price of a hardware company, an a small one at that, to nine billion dollars, is insane.
Making money is okay, but there's something sick about making more money in a day than thousands of people combined will make together in their lifetimes...
But, even still RMS isn't asking for a boycot of Redhat or VA. He wants a boycot on a company that's using software patents in a predatory manner.
You make excellent points. Consider this the longform equivalent of a +1 moderation.
I've often argued for a keyword based naming system for searching, where 'movies' 'reviews' pulls up a list of movie review sites, instead of having to use movies.com or moviereviews.com, which are a pain, don't necessarily provide the best service, and are limited, where few sites can exist with similar names.
Sites could be known by something like an IPv6 IP number, something that wouldn't like current IPs do. Then the IP to Names relationship would be like the yellow pages, where you use keywords to narrow down the search, and once you find a company, you 'bookmark' it by writing down (programming) the phone number.
This way, any number of sites can share the same category. If they pick obvious keywords only, their category gets found easier, but they're in a bigger list. But, no one site stands out based on having keywords that others can't have.
Today's situation is like being able to buy the 'Sex' or 'Entertainment' section of the yellow pages, so that you're the only company there.
Great, we imbue a token with some value, then when easy creation of that token becomes possible, we outlaw such creation instead of picking a new token?
So, pacific islanders should start massive projects to poison sea creatures with shells, to prevent the devaluation of a shell-based economy? And those people who use large carved stones for money, they should outlaw a hammer and chisel?
You know, it'd be easier to simply change the tokens we use. If paper is hard to copy, then use coins with a chip in them, or somehow printing into the paper of the bill. If that proves impractical, either use tokens of a real worth (ie, gold) or use digital tokens and drop the whole idea of physical cash.
But, don't outlaw basic tools, or cripple them, preventing us from creating many things, just because we might forge a token.
The only way to preserve the value of cash is to make the cash inherently valuable, or to pick a token that can't be copied. If the colors and design of the bills can change, why can't the basic type of money change?
I guess I could have been more clear. I considered a few radio and TV channels to be 'essential services' for broadcast where fiber isn't practical. But, with something like CBC bringing news and some entertainment, I think the rest of the airwaves are better used for something other than TV/Radio.
Personally, I consider Iridium and other global sat-phone services to be more of a public service than sattelite TV, if they both used the same bandwidth.
And, you can still get TV signals. When a decent downlink gets to 4mbit or so, a private TV feed is doable, in TV quality, after being MPEG2ed.
And, if the phone system was smart enough, everyone in the area who wanted to watch that program could, assuming it was a public feed, so that it would only be broadcast once.
The difference between video on demand over the air, and current broadcast being that with video on demand, the service is being requested, it's not being 'spammed' to everyone. And with small cells within a city, you could serve a virtually unlimited number of people with low-power cells, instead of wasting the whole spectrum on TV signals, regardless of who watches.
> Come on, this is opinion, not fact.
Not at all.
I assume you'll agree that the OS is the base for the whole system. If the OS is crap, the systems is crap. If the OS is buggy, the system is buggy.
So, why don't you agree that if the OS is closed source, and unauditable, that the whole system gains those worst traits?
Using closed source security systems, with black-box encryption is a bad idea. You can't see the potential bugs, so you can't guard against them.
Why is an OS any less prone to this? In fact, using a security system (PGP, etc) on a closed source OS is insecure. You don't know if there's a way for processes to read the memory of other processes, or if buffer overruns or other easily audited bugs exist which could crash the system under heavy load.
This isn't an issue which is based on opinion. The more open the source, the more people who can find bugs.
Open source doesn't always mean GPL. And even in a GPLed project, the dev team doesn't always solicit code. About all we can agree upon is that open source is source that is readable by everyone.
An OS isn't the place for strange proprietary code, an OS is the place for well tested, frequently audited, stable, open, and trusted code.
And, why do we need another OS? Do I believe we've got the best we'll ever get?
No.
But, I don't believe some hand-coded closed source, non-protected memory OS is *ever* going to rival what we have. If this was a real protected mode OS, with a decent design spec addressing current concerns, and those of the future, I might give it a little credit.
But, V2 lacks so many features of what we'd consider a real OS that it doesn't even belong in the same ballpark as MS-DOS, let alone Linux, BSD, and even NT.
But, that car isn't built with a very finite public resource. When cars are built with in such a way that only 20-30 can operate within a certain area, then they might be comparable to radio signals.
I think that all signals transmitted through public airspace should immediately fall under a free distribution license. Different from public domain. In PD, the work is completely open, you could claim you wrote it and disto it under your own copyright. But with free distro rights on otherwise copyrighted work, as long as you didn't modify it, or claim ownership, etc, you'd be able to distribute it.
The airwaves are too valuable for things that have to be mobile, like cell phones, police radios, and the like, to waste them by letting people broadcast proprietary copyrighted and unredistributable works. I'd like to see all TV, radio, and internet, except for some public service radio channels, and internet via cellular, go to fiber soon.
The cellphone companies have the right idea. While they have lobbied for some laws against listening in on cell calls, they simply encrypted them. The smart thing to do, use technology instead of the law.
Anways, I don't think the idea of commercials as seperate entities is going to exist much longer, they're too easy to edit out with devices like a tivo. But how do you edit out the fact that Ms McBeal is drinking a coke and driving a lexus?
This would drastically change the whole industry. When anyone watching Ally McBeal is seeing the ads, why will they want to limit distribution? In fact, they'll encourage it if they're smart. If you record a show, you'll see the same product placements later. They'll simply expand the nielson ratings to include time-shifted viewings and multiple viewings of taped material.
I've done my share of ASM disassembles, thank you. It's not as easy as all that. I mean, the instructions are there in front of you, and if it's on OS you can be fairly sure they aren't going to try to obfuscate, like a company writing copy protection might.
But, for something as powerful as an OS, and with as much potential to screw things up if it's not used right, it's not enough to trace through and NOP out a few instructions, you have to understand everything, including figuring out what all the variables are and naming them.
An assembler takes ASM instructions and lets you use labels, if you disassemble an exe (that has been stripped), those labels are gone.
Exactly. It's yet another OS, and it's not open source. (I'm taking your word for this, their site appears to be /.ed and I can't check to look for source.)
// booted in only four seconds, off of a floppy no less, and the OS was under 8k!) then why would people switch to it and code apps for it when they'd have to reinvent the wheel just to eventually be where we already are.
Bear with me on this. If an application isn't open source, only that application and the users of it will suffer. If an OS isn't open source, all applications and all users suffer.
The OS is the one part that *must* be open source. If it's not, the whole house of cards might as well be built on prime Florida landfill.
And, why do we need another OS? This one seems to have one benefit, it's the easiest way to ship some piece of software that just plans on taking over the hardware as soon as it's loaded. If I was writing software to turn a PC into a network diagnostic unit or a robotics control station for an automated drill, this would be fine.
But for anything else, the network effect is the biggest problem. When Linux came out, it had TCP/IP networking and was a unix-like. You could network it with other OSes and didn't have to learn a new OS paradigm to use it. Does this 37k OS support that?
And, why do we need a new OS? Seriously. If this doesn't offer any improvements (other than size and speed, but my Apple
And then, even if they had a reason, why would they pick a closed source OS?
There will always be a certain ammount of 'fitness' simply because a project is open source, especially if it's GPLed or otherwise locked from becoming proprietary.
The OSS you know what's in it and know that it won't change in ways that make it less usefull.
If you're locking into NT, you never know what MS will do. They might 'break' major connectivity preventing some part of your project from working. Many businesses I know use unix for mailservers and other important machines, and NT to admin the lower-end user boxes. What if part of this was broken. You'd have to change how your department ran, or switch to a new OS.
If you were locked into Linux, this wouldn't happen. There's no incentive for Linus to change protocols to be less compatible with other OSes, and even if he wanted it, he's only the most prominent voice in the primary branch, many distros would simply 'patch' the imcompatibility and continue business as usual.
Similarly, any closed source software can be modified in ways that are detrimental to you and you can't do anything about it, especially if there are needed patches which are only in the new version. (Think NT and the killer service packs.)
I do low-end database work for a client who uses Paradox for compatibility with the Corel office suite, and at each new release we have to go through and fix a bunch of problems preventing our old programs from running on the new 'compatible' version. If this was an open project, this wouldn't happen.
(And yes, I believe you can be 'locked' into Linux, or unix at least (being as replacing unix with BSD or vice versa is fairly easy). Simply have a large number of critical apps working on it without better solutions in another OS. But I don't see it as being a bad OS to be locked into, if you must be locked into something.)
Is there a way to write to the VMWare image file from the host OS? I mean, could you read the files from the Zip with the host, write a VMWare virtual partion with the host, and then real the virtual HD from the guest OS?
Seems better than trying to do some strange hardware emulation with the parallel port.
IDE works great for slow CD-Rs... I wouldn't waste a Plextor 32/8/8 on it, but then, Plextor doesn't make IDE CD-Rs (that I know of).
But, if you spread devices out across IDE channels properly, you're fine. It takes more IRQs, but other than that...
Four IDE channels is two main HDs on their own, two secondary on a third, and CD devices on the fourth.
If you do mix CDs and HDs on the same channel, just use common sense. Don't put the burner and the HD with the ISOs on the same channel, etc.
It's a poor-man's SCSI, but if you have four or less (or eight or less with a board like the BP6/BE6) then it's really just as good.
Yeah, I meant population, not area. But until Moose start buying CDs we won't have much clout in the music industry.
I've seen a lot of maps from the USA where the countries (Mexico and Canada) to either end just aren't there, there's a big hole between Alaska and Washington... Or worse, Alaska is moved down into the water off the Washington shore.
With visual aids like that in schools, it's not hard to understand the problems people can have.
Yes, email clients saving cookies is a bug.
But, in the thirty seconds it took me to read your message I thought of another way to do it that would catch a lot of people.
Include an image in the page, the URL of which contains a different ID for each person the email was sent to, but which returns the same picture.
The website records IPs and then if it gets a cookie set by one of the banner sites in some period of time it assumes it's the same person.
My solution would be that email have to include all the secondary files (images, etc) as attachments and load the local copies. So, unless the user clicks on a link (which would be passed to the webbrowser window) nothing external needs to be loaded.
I'd also recommend to anyone writing a browser that they not let any pluggins load from a page received in email without the user clicking a link.
Not loading cookies from anywhere except the domain in the location bar seems to be a good idea. (Otherwise all it takes even with a 'only load cookies from the open page' setting would be to open an invisible frame and load something in it.
Not only do I doubt they can do it... with the aforementioned brain drain, how will they keep any good hackers in a low-paying government job?
And if they do manage it a few hacks, the rest of the world will just firewall off Australia, as the RBL would do if the government legalized SPAM.
Clueless.
If Quebec is 80% French speaking, then the stores which didn't cater to that population would quickly go out of business.
If they didn't, it shows that the language issue isn't as important as the politicians would have you believe.
This whole distinct society thing is crap. Grow up and quit whining. If everyone around you speaks English, then speak it yourself or at least don't cry when people don't want to speak to you.
There is a difference between a dumb law and one hopelessly outdated..
Maybe there is a good reason for keeping a donkey from sleeping in a bathtub and it's just that we don't own donkeys now (the average person) and so don't understand it.
A little history, just a line or two, would put this in context and make it a lot more interesting.
Then there are the good, or just not-bad laws that don't really need to be listed. If there's a practical reason for a law and it doesn't severely infringe on civil rights, it probably isn't interesting enough to bother listing.
The 'dumb laws' are the current ones that are still being enforced but for the wrong reasons. This list contains ones like the six or more women living in one house law.
Having laws sorted in these categories, dumb, outdated, and rational (removed from the site) would IMHO improve it a bit.
You might be able to solicit help from the Alt.folklore.urban people in tracking down some of the more oddball laws (see the AFU article on 'rule of thumb' mentioned earlier.)
Actually, having a section on laws that don't really exist but that most people think exist would be good too... Such as "A common misconception is that you were allowed to beat your wife with a stick not to exceed..." and some citations regarding this.
A site with that is one that I would browse for fun and refer people to, both for humor and to correct their misconceptions.
BTW, Moderators, mark Andy's post up, it's probably the most ontopic one on this thread.