It seems as if you are still a bit confused on the matter of GNU, GPL and RMS. Particularly this bit clued me in:
GNU is more than just a license and is more than just a way of thinking. GNU is about freedom.
See, GNU is not a license. (That's GPL (GNU Public License).) And while GNU is frequently used to refer to the Free Software movement this is not entirely correct.
GNU (GNU's Not Unix) is really a part of an OS. It provides libraries for basic functions for control of the computer. It also has a lot of small programs which are essential for having a usable computer. (cat, grep etc.)
You seem to confuse GNU with both the license and in your "Eli's cake analogy" with RMS himself. GNU is not a name of a person, neither is it a license.
Now to expand the AC's previous explaination:
Linux is a kernel. It makes it possible to use the processor in a shared enviroment. It also provides a lot of system specific commands. (Filesystem manipulation like "ls", "cd" and such are implemented in the kernel.)
GNU is the libraries and small programs around the kernel. As previously mentioned grep and cat are examples of these. If you didn't have these your computer would be pretty much useless.
Your GNU/Linux system has both of these in it. Technically you could probably call it "KDE/X/GNU/Linux" or something like that. But neither KDE nor X are required. You still have a usable system without them.
You can also, here demonstrated with the HURD, exchange one or both of the parts in GNU/Linux. If you change the kernel with e.g. HURD you get GNU/HURD. (And here consider that both GNU and HURD have been made by "the same people". So it's not that they want to "put their name on it".)
You could also exchange the GNU part with something else like TNG (TNG's Not GNU) (Yes, I just made that up.) You could then have TNG/Linux or TNG/HURD.
So to conclude:
GNU/Linux is not to "put a name on Linux".
GNU is not the name of the license. (That's GPL.)
GNU is does not refer to the people behind the project.
GNU is not an ideology. (That's Free Software.)
For more thoughts on this check www.gnu.org, there are some more philosphical essays on the topic there.
BTW I avoided to comment on your "Eli's cheesecake" example as it's not complete, and a pretty poor analogy. (And irrelevant to the GNU/Linux discussion.) But the biggest mistake you have made is to ignore the cost of ingredients and time to bake the cake. Also you ignore that you get some quality assurance and most likely a very nice cake when you buy it from Eli.
Every game that has appeared and will appear on a Playstation2 could be ported to the PC without too much effort.
Yes, if you consider "Recoding from scratch" to be without too much effort. The PS2 has a radically different architecture from a PC. (Or other consoles.)
Here is the simple reason why: A PC better[changed from greater than] Playstation2
In some ways yes, in others no. More specifically. A PC has generally more memory and a beefier CPU than a PS2. A PS2 OTOH has more advanced co-processors and high bandwidth. Go read some articles on Ars Technica if you're interested in the details.
No, not necessarily. When speaking about compression, encryption and coding the term "symbol" generally represent a block of bits. Like "63" in ASCII represent "a". (I can't be bothered to look the number up so don't kill me if I got it wrong, please.;-)
The size of the block is generally different for different symbols. This is the basic idea behind compression, let common sequences be represented by a smaller bitsequence, a kind of short hand if you will.
What they do here is take an original file, generate a new sequence of symbols which represent the same file, but with redundancy. (The opposite of compression, you add information. (Not willy nilly naturally)) The receiver will then not need ALL of the generated "sequence of symbols" only enough to determine the original file uniquely.
If you're interested in it look upp "Huffman coding" for an example of elegant coding. That might clear some details up. (That is for compression though, not for adding redundancy.)
I looked into Swarmcast this summer (really cool stuff BTW) and it's based on the same papers. Both seem to use FEC (also used by satellite comms), at least I know Swarmcast does.
However, while Swarmcast was mainly a download utility, not unlike GetRight and similar tools, this system seem to be more general. The site hints that it should be possible to use for any net transfer. (Technically that would be possible with Swarmcast as well, but it wasn't implemented.)
I think this product is more of a "TurnKey" thing. But if you are interested in it then go and look at the code for Swarmcast. It's most likely quite similar in design.
You need to get bigger / more fans. A friend of mine had problems with his Athlon because it didn't have proper cooling. (The fan was rated at the specific speed, it just didn't do the trick anyways.)
A new CPU fan later and his system is running nicely.
Not that I've read the follow-up article but from what I've heard it wasn't the AMD chip which was at fault. It's a BIOS bug, not a processor thing. (Not that it will help you if your processor burns, but when you get a new MB get one without a buggy BIOS.)
Eh? I would hardly call SOAP/XML an alternative to logging onto a remote computer typing "export display:local_ip:0" and then running programs as if I was running them on my own computer. (I have a fat pipe, so I don't notice the lag much.)
For some things a WWW interface is sufficient, but try eg editing a file that way.
Persoanlly I always thought the idea of NOW was really interesting. Unfortunately the interview is short on details on this topic. Basically it's referred to as "flawed from the beginning" or something.
Does anyone know what went wrong with it, or if anything went right? I mean, it's more of a "dotnet" idea then anything Microsoft has thought of, it would be great to have it up and running. (And from what I've understood there are several achademic OS's that operate along the lines of Linux NOW.)
If you bothered to read the article you would know that there is one (significant) way which makes ext3 better than both Reiser and XFS. It can journal data.
This means that you will not open up your XF86config file and discover that the powerfailiure has now resulted in a file full of zeroes.
To me/that/ is a good reason to use ext3. I still use XFS on my file server though. Because that's what it (XFS) is great at. (Big files, lot's of files and lot's of accessing.)
I have only read the first one (I have all four.) as of yet. But I can tell you that if you are used to reading you won't be wasting time reading it. Since it's geared towards children it has the reading difficulty to match. I read it in one sitting, 'bout 5 hours or so.
I wasn't completely impressed. There's a lot better fantasy books out there. (LoTR to mention one.) But it's not bad.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 1
Reading is reading. No matter what, and it will always be better than watching TV, movies, etc.
Bollox! There are a lot of movies that require more thought than a lot of books. Just watch Kubrik's movies, a lot of thought has gone into those and they are really good. Or watch some of Kieslowski's movies. They are on the movie level of Ulysses.
Although movies often have lower intelligence demands than books theat is not how it has to be. Actually it's mainly in Hollywood that that is a demand. And even they manage to let a few slip through the net.
(And yes I have read the first Potter book, and I read a/lot/ of books.)
if the port is greater than 1024 then any UID can open it, overflow it and you only get the privs of the opening UID.
Yes, but that doesn't help you if the application is actually runs as root. (Sub 1024 ports are blocked for users because they are reserved ports, ftp and such should not be "spoofable" by users.) If your web server runs as root it doesn't matter if it's at port 80 or port 8080. If it's hacked it will give a root priviliges in any case. (Not that a www server/should/ be running as root.)
Another thing is what about outgoing connections? Don't they establish a dialog, you know two way, as in talking also involve listening.
Yes, when an outgoing connection is established then the firewall/NAT will redirect a port in the other direction for the "answer". However this port is bound to a specific IP. (The IP of the computer the internal computer was contacting.) So it's not all that easy to exploit. (It can be done of course.)
And of course security is an illusion. You are never completely safe. That doesn't mean you should begin doing stupid things just because "well we are not safe anyways". Then you might as well tear the firewall down, it won't do you any good.
AI is a very wide field. Generally genetic algorithms and neural networks are but into it. As well as game playing, searching and logic. (And basically each book / course on the topic is different.)
Actually very few people which work with AI actually work with making computers "think". Most people work with trying to replace a specific subset of human intelligence. (Naturally you can do AI things without imitating human intelligence, just generally flashy stuff is good too.;-)
In this case a DJ is imitated. (Most likely not as well as a good DJ. But the mere geek factor is enough to do it if you ask me.;-)
No, because there can be several authentification servers running. You would only get root at the user level one. (Hooked to a FTP or WWW server perhaps.) So the hacker could at most be able to do damage there.
However, as the servers (FTP/WWW) now instead of running priviliged are as default "no user" they have zero permissions on the system. So even if you overflowed a server and got shell you wouldn't be able to do anything with it. (Except trying to authenticate yourself with the auth. server. (local to the FTP/WWW server) And you would most likely fail at that, otherwise you wouldn't have hacked it, would you?)
So all and all it's a pretty good (and elegant) solution.
Doesn't all CD and DVD drives have connections for Audio as it is? Both digital and analog, which you just hook up to the soundcard.
Why should that be in the ATA/SCSI specification? If it doesn't touch the computers busses it seems redundant. (I mean that it goes directly from CD->sound card.)
Naturally this doesn't solve the error correction (as it is now). But to do that well you'll need to by pass the CD controllers probably. And that's sounds too expensive to do as default. (If you need it you'll have to de-assemble the drive yourself.)
I remember reading about a guy who got FC to work with his desktop while being rather cheap. Unfortunately I can't remember the URL, but you might find it searching the web.
He did get the stuff from eBay and some spare parts from a manufacturer. It didn't seem extremely expensive. (But then the benefits wheren't that great neither. Other than bragging rights.)
You can hot swap IDE. As long as the controller supports it. The high end IDE RAID cards have been doing that for a while now. Check promise.com if you don't believe me.
As was mentioned above, a lot of the newer optimizations used in the "big" compilers are patented. So there's not really all that much the GCC team can do.
And BTW, these non-standard features are well documented and available for all other compiler writers to implement.
Regular compilers have more time, but they have neither the available memory nor the accurate statistics that a run time compiler/optimizer has.
If the Transmeta Code morphing engine discover that a particular FOR loop is running a lot then it can unroll it to a sequence. This is prohibitive in a normal compiler because it would result in much larger exe files.
One constant factor at least I have seen when people get motion sick for games is that the FPS is too low. As long as you are 30+ most people are fine. (There are some that still get motion sickness. But that's mostly with very "motion sick" games like Descent.)
After reading the article (Which seem to be more about IP issues than the actual format.) and the FAQ at the site I still fail to se whatäs so great.
Ok so you can have drag and drop support from the OS. Today you need an application for it, although in Win you can use DirectCD to make it more or less invisible to the user. Apparently that can be done in Mac OS as well.
It's true that a normal CD-RW disc doesn't work in all the old CD players, but if the alternative is to get a new burner it's pretty much moot if you ask me.
Why would I want to buy a new CDR unit just to avoid formatting the disk? What's the point of this?
Slashdot Mirror
See, GNU is not a license. (That's GPL (GNU Public License).) And while GNU is frequently used to refer to the Free Software movement this is not entirely correct.
GNU (GNU's Not Unix) is really a part of an OS. It provides libraries for basic functions for control of the computer. It also has a lot of small programs which are essential for having a usable computer. (cat, grep etc.)
You seem to confuse GNU with both the license and in your "Eli's cake analogy" with RMS himself. GNU is not a name of a person, neither is it a license.
Now to expand the AC's previous explaination:
Linux is a kernel. It makes it possible to use the processor in a shared enviroment. It also provides a lot of system specific commands. (Filesystem manipulation like "ls", "cd" and such are implemented in the kernel.)
GNU is the libraries and small programs around the kernel. As previously mentioned grep and cat are examples of these. If you didn't have these your computer would be pretty much useless.
Your GNU/Linux system has both of these in it. Technically you could probably call it "KDE/X/GNU/Linux" or something like that. But neither KDE nor X are required. You still have a usable system without them.
You can also, here demonstrated with the HURD, exchange one or both of the parts in GNU/Linux. If you change the kernel with e.g. HURD you get GNU/HURD. (And here consider that both GNU and HURD have been made by "the same people". So it's not that they want to "put their name on it".)
You could also exchange the GNU part with something else like TNG (TNG's Not GNU) (Yes, I just made that up.) You could then have TNG/Linux or TNG/HURD.
So to conclude:
GNU/Linux is not to "put a name on Linux".
GNU is not the name of the license. (That's GPL.)
GNU is does not refer to the people behind the project.
GNU is not an ideology. (That's Free Software.)
For more thoughts on this check www.gnu.org, there are some more philosphical essays on the topic there.
BTW I avoided to comment on your "Eli's cheesecake" example as it's not complete, and a pretty poor analogy. (And irrelevant to the GNU/Linux discussion.) But the biggest mistake you have made is to ignore the cost of ingredients and time to bake the cake. Also you ignore that you get some quality assurance and most likely a very nice cake when you buy it from Eli.
Yes, if you consider "Recoding from scratch" to be without too much effort. The PS2 has a radically different architecture from a PC. (Or other consoles.)
In some ways yes, in others no. More specifically. A PC has generally more memory and a beefier CPU than a PS2. A PS2 OTOH has more advanced co-processors and high bandwidth. Go read some articles on Ars Technica if you're interested in the details.
No, not necessarily. When speaking about compression, encryption and coding the term "symbol" generally represent a block of bits. Like "63" in ASCII represent "a". (I can't be bothered to look the number up so don't kill me if I got it wrong, please. ;-)
The size of the block is generally different for different symbols. This is the basic idea behind compression, let common sequences be represented by a smaller bitsequence, a kind of short hand if you will.
What they do here is take an original file, generate a new sequence of symbols which represent the same file, but with redundancy. (The opposite of compression, you add information. (Not willy nilly naturally)) The receiver will then not need ALL of the generated "sequence of symbols" only enough to determine the original file uniquely.
If you're interested in it look upp "Huffman coding" for an example of elegant coding. That might clear some details up. (That is for compression though, not for adding redundancy.)
I looked into Swarmcast this summer (really cool stuff BTW) and it's based on the same papers. Both seem to use FEC (also used by satellite comms), at least I know Swarmcast does.
However, while Swarmcast was mainly a download utility, not unlike GetRight and similar tools, this system seem to be more general. The site hints that it should be possible to use for any net transfer. (Technically that would be possible with Swarmcast as well, but it wasn't implemented.)
I think this product is more of a "TurnKey" thing. But if you are interested in it then go and look at the code for Swarmcast. It's most likely quite similar in design.
You need to get bigger / more fans. A friend of mine had problems with his Athlon because it didn't have proper cooling. (The fan was rated at the specific speed, it just didn't do the trick anyways.)
A new CPU fan later and his system is running nicely.
Not that I've read the follow-up article but from what I've heard it wasn't the AMD chip which was at fault. It's a BIOS bug, not a processor thing. (Not that it will help you if your processor burns, but when you get a new MB get one without a buggy BIOS.)
I prefer the way it was done in the unknowned film "Nirvana". (Gibson-esque world in the near future.)
It went from a female voice to a computer/harsh (Think ED209 in Robocop.) voice in a few steps. It also had the added twist:
"Step away or you will be electrocuted."
Which I'd think would be a lot more efficent that "rape" or "fire".
Eh? I would hardly call SOAP/XML an alternative to logging onto a remote computer typing "export display:local_ip:0" and then running programs as if I was running them on my own computer. (I have a fat pipe, so I don't notice the lag much.)
For some things a WWW interface is sufficient, but try eg editing a file that way.
Persoanlly I always thought the idea of NOW was really interesting. Unfortunately the interview is short on details on this topic. Basically it's referred to as "flawed from the beginning" or something.
Does anyone know what went wrong with it, or if anything went right? I mean, it's more of a "dotnet" idea then anything Microsoft has thought of, it would be great to have it up and running. (And from what I've understood there are several achademic OS's that operate along the lines of Linux NOW.)
If you bothered to read the article you would know that there is one (significant) way which makes ext3 better than both Reiser and XFS. It can journal data.
/that/ is a good reason to use ext3. I still use XFS on my file server though. Because that's what it (XFS) is great at. (Big files, lot's of files and lot's of accessing.)
This means that you will not open up your XF86config file and discover that the powerfailiure has now resulted in a file full of zeroes.
To me
I have only read the first one (I have all four.) as of yet. But I can tell you that if you are used to reading you won't be wasting time reading it. Since it's geared towards children it has the reading difficulty to match. I read it in one sitting, 'bout 5 hours or so.
I wasn't completely impressed. There's a lot better fantasy books out there. (LoTR to mention one.) But it's not bad.
Bollox! There are a lot of movies that require more thought than a lot of books. Just watch Kubrik's movies, a lot of thought has gone into those and they are really good. Or watch some of Kieslowski's movies. They are on the movie level of Ulysses.
Although movies often have lower intelligence demands than books theat is not how it has to be. Actually it's mainly in Hollywood that that is a demand. And even they manage to let a few slip through the net.
(And yes I have read the first Potter book, and I read a
Yes, but that doesn't help you if the application is actually runs as root. (Sub 1024 ports are blocked for users because they are reserved ports, ftp and such should not be "spoofable" by users.) If your web server runs as root it doesn't matter if it's at port 80 or port 8080. If it's hacked it will give a root priviliges in any case. (Not that a www server
Yes, when an outgoing connection is established then the firewall/NAT will redirect a port in the other direction for the "answer". However this port is bound to a specific IP. (The IP of the computer the internal computer was contacting.) So it's not all that easy to exploit. (It can be done of course.)
And of course security is an illusion. You are never completely safe. That doesn't mean you should begin doing stupid things just because "well we are not safe anyways". Then you might as well tear the firewall down, it won't do you any good.
AI is a very wide field. Generally genetic algorithms and neural networks are but into it. As well as game playing, searching and logic. (And basically each book / course on the topic is different.)
;-)
;-)
Actually very few people which work with AI actually work with making computers "think". Most people work with trying to replace a specific subset of human intelligence. (Naturally you can do AI things without imitating human intelligence, just generally flashy stuff is good too.
In this case a DJ is imitated. (Most likely not as well as a good DJ. But the mere geek factor is enough to do it if you ask me.
No, because there can be several authentification servers running. You would only get root at the user level one. (Hooked to a FTP or WWW server perhaps.) So the hacker could at most be able to do damage there.
However, as the servers (FTP/WWW) now instead of running priviliged are as default "no user" they have zero permissions on the system. So even if you overflowed a server and got shell you wouldn't be able to do anything with it. (Except trying to authenticate yourself with the auth. server. (local to the FTP/WWW server) And you would most likely fail at that, otherwise you wouldn't have hacked it, would you?)
So all and all it's a pretty good (and elegant) solution.
Doesn't all CD and DVD drives have connections for Audio as it is? Both digital and analog, which you just hook up to the soundcard.
Why should that be in the ATA/SCSI specification? If it doesn't touch the computers busses it seems redundant. (I mean that it goes directly from CD->sound card.)
Naturally this doesn't solve the error correction (as it is now). But to do that well you'll need to by pass the CD controllers probably. And that's sounds too expensive to do as default. (If you need it you'll have to de-assemble the drive yourself.)
I remember reading about a guy who got FC to work with his desktop while being rather cheap. Unfortunately I can't remember the URL, but you might find it searching the web.
He did get the stuff from eBay and some spare parts from a manufacturer. It didn't seem extremely expensive. (But then the benefits wheren't that great neither. Other than bragging rights.)
StorageReview (www.storagereview.com) did a test with IDE RAID5 cards. Basically they blew. Slower than software RAID 1.
You can hot swap IDE. As long as the controller supports it. The high end IDE RAID cards have been doing that for a while now. Check promise.com if you don't believe me.
As was mentioned above, a lot of the newer optimizations used in the "big" compilers are patented. So there's not really all that much the GCC team can do.
And BTW, these non-standard features are well documented and available for all other compiler writers to implement.
Regular compilers have more time, but they have neither the available memory nor the accurate statistics that a run time compiler/optimizer has.
If the Transmeta Code morphing engine discover that a particular FOR loop is running a lot then it can unroll it to a sequence. This is prohibitive in a normal compiler because it would result in much larger exe files.
It will hardly kill the CPU of a gamer-rig today. The XBox has a 700MHz P3. That's pretty bad for a gamers box these days.
And if you have a GeForce3 or similar it should be able to hold up the graphics department. The big problem will probably be bandwidth.
(And the fact that you can't really release a game targetted towards only high-high-end computers.)
One constant factor at least I have seen when people get motion sick for games is that the FPS is too low. As long as you are 30+ most people are fine. (There are some that still get motion sickness. But that's mostly with very "motion sick" games like Descent.)
After reading the article (Which seem to be more about IP issues than the actual format.) and the FAQ at the site I still fail to se whatäs so great.
Ok so you can have drag and drop support from the OS. Today you need an application for it, although in Win you can use DirectCD to make it more or less invisible to the user. Apparently that can be done in Mac OS as well.
It's true that a normal CD-RW disc doesn't work in all the old CD players, but if the alternative is to get a new burner it's pretty much moot if you ask me.
Why would I want to buy a new CDR unit just to avoid formatting the disk? What's the point of this?
Yeah, but we do know how to dicipline them. You only need to hit the bottle repeatedly with a pencil. ;-)