Repeat after me: OS X != BSD
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MacOS X DP3
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· Score: 5
Let's not get sloppy here. The kernel which OS X and NextStep run on is the Mach kernel, written at Carnegie Mellon. It bears little or no resemblance to the BSD kernel.
In a microkernel, what we'd traditionally think of as a "kernel" is reduced to code supporting a set of abstractions for tasks, threads, memory objects, messages, and ports. Things like file systems, networking code, etc... are all implemented in user space using formal message passing to communicate with the "kernel". As a rule of thumb, if it can be implemented in a platform-independent manner, it's not in kernel space.
Mach is actually "OS Neutral". However, rather than having to port all of the system libraries of an OS to use this new, extremely different kernel interface, it's usually easier to write code which implements a the kernel API of another OS. Here's the BSD tie-in: BSD is one of the OS "personalities" available for Mach. Someone has done the work for a Linux personality too (MkLinux). In this sense, OS X is not BSD at all- the kernel code is completely different. On the other hand, it will include a full BSD 4.4lite environment of system programs and utilities, and uses much of the BSD kernel code to implment filesystem, networking, etc... that is "outside" the kernel.
What I don't know is what API the bulk of OS X is based on. Perhaps the different run time environments / programming models used by OS X (Carbon, Cocoa, etc...) are using diffent base kernel APIs. I'm guessing they didn't port all the old MacOS stuff to the BSD personality- it would make more sense to write a MacOS personality for Mach. How about Cocoa- does anyone know if the new / NextSteppish stuff has the BSD kernel API under it?
Print screen requires that the OS can read the bits in the clear. Because this is intended for copy protection, it will likely only be used for movies. Which means that the OS doesn't necessarily need to have access to the clear, unencrypted data so that "print screen" will work. The DVD decoder could output encrypted data to be stored in the display buffers and sent as is to the monitor. On a "normal" monitor, it would appear as garbage. On an Intel-licensed monitor, you'd see the movie.
Of course, this is all speculation, but I'm guessing there wouldn't be a hole that big...
The main use of this kind of technology would be copy protection. Let's say that the DVD encryption standard is improved to the point that it is unbreakable (hah!), and the only way to watch DVD's is with a legitimately licensed DVD decoder.
In order for you to watch this DVD, at some point the bits have to be decrypted and put onto the screen in front of you. MPAA and co. are scared that if you're clever enough pirate, you'd find a way to grab those bits between the decrypt and the display.
This is a pretty reasonable concern if you're an agressive paranoid about copy protection. Assuming the bad guy has a good MP3 decoder, grabbing the bits off of a digital display output for an LCD monitor would give you an extremely high quality reproduction of a movie. With standardization of digital display outputs, there's a potential for someone to legally build and sell a "black box" device for this purpose.
Thus, the need to encrypt all the way to the LCD monitor. If the decrypt happens inside the monitor, it's much, much more difficult to grab the clean bits.
Because the holders of the display encryption technology copywrites would only license it to authorized monitor manufacturers, there'd be no legitimate, legal devices on the market which could bypass it. There's no "standard" interface through which the clear signal runs, so getting around the encryption would require reverse engineering of specific monitor designs, and you'd end up with something that only worked for a specific monitor model.
I wonder when we'll see standards for encryption of audio signals all the way out to the speakers...
I'm with a company that IPO'd last year, and the restrictions on what a public company can say are tremendous. Basically, they can't share substantive information with any specific group- they have to share it with everybody in the world at once. So, it's basically impossible for him to say something straightforward and specific about any future plans, until they're ready for "the announcement". It would be impossible for him to give a straightforward answer on AMD- clearly, VA supporting AMD would be a BIG DEAL, and he couldn't say anything about it one way or the other until it's official.
I guarantee that post was checked by a lawyer before it was posted here.
I've not really dug into this stuff, but from a cursory glance, isn't it true that the reverse engineering of the encryption algorithm is being treated separately from the "intellectual property" that is the master encryption key that is necessary to encode the disks?
If this is true, AND the main issue is that this key was gleaned from the object code of a licensed software DVD player, why can't one get around this issue by brute-forcing the key? I thought it was only 40 bits. Then it would be a "pure" reverse engineer, and not not be reliant on this supposedly stolen piece of intellectual property?
Or have I missed some details in my skimming of the issues?
I took a compiler class in college, but only remember enough to be curioius, and am hoping someone who knows what they're talking about could answer.
Compilers do a lot of compile-time reasoning to try to predict what happens at run time, optimizing both register use and instuction order. However, this is not done solely based on the ISA- there are significant assumptions about how the processor actually executes instructions.
Crusoe, in optimizing execution, has the benefit of *knowing* what's happening at run time, as opposed to a normal compiler that has to guess about it at compile time. Also, because the x86 ISA is implemented in software, they could do all sorts of crazy stuff beyond instruction reordering. For example, if the compiler guessed wrong about what set of values to keep in the registers, the code morphing software might be able map hardware registers in Crusoe to values that were being sent to memory in the original code.
Which is all well and good. But given that there now are two astonishingly different execution models for x86 code, what are compiler writers supposed to do? Is the amount of information that a run-time optimizer has so much better than a compile-time optimizer that the compiler guys should just give up? Or do the constraints on the complexity of run-time algorithms (they've got to be *fast*) mean that compiler optimization is still worthwhile? If so, how will compiler authors cope with the potentially vast differences in optimizing for Intel vs Crusoe? Will we be seeing a Crusoe-opimization flag in gcc?
More questions than answers...
But that doesn't mean it's not dangerous
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AOL Nation
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· Score: 3
You are absolutely correct that the monopolistic elements of this merger are completely different than Microsoft's. But it could be even more threatening.
Here's why: Microsoft's monopoly gives it an incredible amount of control over the IT industry that enables it to squeeze out competitive products, keeping prices up and lowering the quality of software available to John Q. Public. This is pretty bad, but realize it's pretty much limited to software.
Time Warner / AOL merger is about control of information. At the same time that the means of information distribution are becoming more global, bashing through cultural barriers (exporting American "culture" everywhere), the number of entities in control of the production of this information and content is shrinking rapidly to a small, oligopolistic group. So we've got an increasingly smaller number of entities controlling the information consumed by an increasingly large amount of the world. This scares me a lot more than OS choice.
The stakes here are much higher. It's easy to have a healthy, democratic society without cheap, effective computer software. It's much harder to have one without free communication and public awareness of critical issues. As the number of truly independent media outlets shrinks, the more sanitized, corporately correct and sensational our primary sources of information become.
So while AOL / TW doesn't have the absolute control over a single product that Microsoft does, it (along with Disney, GE, etc...) has a lot more control over a fundamental part of our society's basic infrastructure (the media) than any one entity should. Which we should all be very concerned about.
I can't disagree with you about it's importance, but I just can't see birth control as a "gadget". To me, gadgets have some sort of "active" function, and most birth control mechanisms could best be described as a "substance". Maybe an IUD would qualify as a gadget, but it's properties are primarily chemical, if I understand them.
Of course, some of the other things on that list are stretching the limits of the term "gadget"...
MS's public face is one thing, but my experience has been that in private meetings their culture is one of pretty heavy self-criticism. I'm no MS advocate, but in my work life I interact with folks at MS pretty regularly, and they can be brutally honest internally. I'm guessing it's one of the reasons they've been successful.
As to the article, I'm guessing the PR people rightly guessed that there's not a lot of risk admitting something didn't work due to unexpected popularity. "Why, there were many more users than even *we* could predict!"
I saw the show while at InternetWorld. It was quite bizarre- in the middle of the downstairs 2nd-class booth space, there was a giant open area with a runway. The "company" sponsoring the show (InfoCharms) is a startup straight out of MIT that obviously hasn't hired any marketing people yet: the "booth" was littered with product concepts presented low-budget academia style.
Besides a lot of skin, what was shown was a combination of bizarre fashion-industry interpretation of "futuristic" clothing with a definite retro spin, costumes from "futuristic" movies and tv shows, concept device mockups, and real wearable computers. The latter were few and far between, and nothing that hasn't been discussed to death on/. already.
The show was fun to watch, if only for seeing two amazingly different worlds colliding. The fashion people seemed to waver between excitement about being on the "leading edge" of something potentially huge and a patronizing smugness about bringing something hip to the poor, uncultured geek heathen. I think some of the attendees were genuinely interested in wearables, but the models definitely were a primary attraction. The pictures really don't do justice to the skimpiness of many of the women's outfits.:-)
The bad guys always seemed to lock them up in a room handily appointed with welding / cutting torches and an abundance of materials to create anything from armored vehicles to oxygen bottle missiles.
This is definitely an "MIT-style" hack- it does not involve computers, but is firmly embedded in the folklore of Rice University.
The Rice Campus is built around a large, open "quad" surrounded by six of the major buildings on campus. In the center of the quad is a statue of William Marsh Rice, who provided the money for the school to get started. The statue is a slightly life-sized bronze of "Willy" sitting in a very large chair. I'm sure it weighs several tons, and is on top of a square stone bier over six feet tall which allegedly contains WMR's remains. (See here for a picture).
One morning in the late 80's, the students awoke to discover that Willy's statue had been perfectly rotated 180 degrees, with no trace of the equipment used to do it.
It turns out that a group of engineering and architecture students had built some sort of inexpensive tripod-like "crane" that was lightweight, portable, and could be assembled *very* quickly. There were some nice subtlelties to the hack:
1. The entire rig could be carried in the back of a pickup
2. Willy is illuminated by a bright mercury vapor light at night. The students started turning the light off at 2:00am for a week prior to the planned rotation to reduce suspicion.
3. Before the actual rotation, the students did a practice run on a previous night, where the statue was simply lifted a couple of inches off the pedestal and set back down again. Which means they effectively got away with it twice.
One of the more humorous parts of the story was about what happened afterwards. The administration was *not amused*, and hired a professional contractor to turn the statue back around. The contractor damaged the statue in the process, and the university billed the students for the whole thing.
Of course, they didn't have any money, so they created a tee-shirt about the rotation. They sold so many that they not only paid the bill, but netted an additional $7,000.
Today, the statue is firmly anchored to it's base.
Can any other Rice alums fill in the details I missed?
I take issue with the way you have grouped voluntary childlessness with a lot of other baggage from your preference for platonic relationships. My wife and I have been married for 5 child-free years. It's a mutual decision that we've never had a disagreement about.
You've described a life where you have to make very few compromises- you game when you want, you bathe when you want, you whack off when you want. You have no committments- you are totally your own person, moving through life without any attachments coming between you and what you want to do. To some extent, I can understand the appeal of that. I gave up a lot of that kind of freedom when we "tied the knot".
The thing is, it was a small price to pay for the immense rewards of a *mutually* committed relationship. To put it simply, I *know* that I'm always going to have someone at my back. Someone who is looking out for me, pushing me to be a better person, helping me grow. And it goes the other way, too... I find it immensely rewarding to do the same for her. And the best part is that it's for life. (Yes, I know not all marriages work this way. Mine happens to, and I feel incredibly blessed that it does.)
But we don't have a minivan. We leave town whenever we want. I can leave computer parts lying around without worring about seeing them on a medical X-ray the next day. Most importantly, we enjoy having a lot of time for ourselves. We would have to give a lot of this up if we have kids.
From what you've written, it sounds to me like you've developed a very stereotypical viewpoint of women (they all want children) and mutually-committed relationships (biological manifest destiny). Maybe it's what's right for you. Before I found the right person, I would have been horrified at the idea of making the sacrifices I have. After I found her, I discovered that there were other things that were important to me, so changing was not a sacrifice.
My point is, don't knock something until you've tried it. Coding and gaming may be what you are optimizing your life for now, but that's based on your current preferences. You may discover some day that there are other things that you enjoy more. Unless you open yourself to that possibility, you'll never know, and could miss out on something wonderful.
And yes, I apply this to myself. My wife and I are keeping an open mind about kids, even though it's not what we want now. Who knows... anything can happen. I just hate to see people who aren't willing to consider that.
The problem with air resistance is not that it would merely slow your launch vehicle down. The problem is that your spacecraft would be doing a killer impression of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man long before it got into orbit.
Shielding works OK for re-entry vehicles when you've got a nice, thin upper atmosphere to slow you down before you get to the thick stuff. Something tells me that surviving orbital velocities near sea-level is going to require something more substantial than ceramic tiles.
We've all heard about the "PC fridge" with the display on the door. Looks like that's missing the real goldmine: *networked toilets*. Yessir, according to this thread, there's a HUGE market of multitasking fanatics who want aren't content to "do their business" without a steady supply of computer generated content.
Of course, this only addresses one of the two primary uses of paper in this setting... but I am NOT going there...;-)
This has been hinted at in a few postings here, but I want to emphasize that there's a BIG difference between how easy things are to learn vs how easy they are to use once you know them well.
Windows is much easier to learn than Linux. Sit pretty much anyone down who knows how to mouse, and (for example, an experienced Mac user) and they'll probably be able to get a lot of things done. The reason is that the GUI provides a lot of context for you- look at an empty screen, and there's a big start button that will lead you to almost everything that's useful on the computer with nice hierarchical labeling.
This does NOT mean that Windows is perfect in this regard- knowing to move a little box with a wire sticking out of it to make an arrow on the screen point at something is a new concept for a LOT of people. But it's possible for a reasonably computer literate person to use without reading any documentation.
It is not possible to find most of the useful things on your average Linux box by pointing and clicking. Yes, it *can* be set up this way for "normal" end-user tasks if someone knows what they are doing comes along and puts all of the right things in (for example) the KDE menuing system. But putting anything new onto the machine (or doing serious reconfiguration work) requires a lot more knowledge than you're likely to get by pointing and clicking. Even finding the right docs can be a real challenge.
But this is all about the first time you use a system. What about the 100th time? If you're a patient user and have taken the time to learn what to do, the problem changes entirely from "how do I find things" to "how do I get to what I need efficiently". IF you know Linux, it's very efficient to get around in. The command namespace is flat- there is no hierarchical set of menus to click through to get to what you need, so every command is at your fingertips if it's in your brain. Most things can be automated with scripting if you know what you're doing, and if typing three keystrokes to get your favorite text editor open (vi) is too much, you can alias it down to two.
My point is that "usability" is not a simple scale with things that are "usable" and things that aren't. A lot of you who love Linux today (including me) would hate some of the changes that would be required to make it more friendly for newbies, because it would sacrifice one kind of usability for another. And no, you can't always have it both ways... some of the properties of Linux that make it so powerful (customization) also fundamentally decrease the newbie-friendliness.
It seems to be on the index page now, with the new headline.
It bugs me that some people jump so quickly to the conclusion that "big brother" is censoring slashdot when it probably was just a technical issue. Just apply Occam's Razor, and think about how often there are "glitches" compared to how often/. censors stories.
And I'm glad they caught the idiot. Even if you can rationalize the stuff that happened in the chatroom as "role playing" that ended when he showed up in person. Do you think he was expecting to find someone that was "role playing" with him?
Do a listening test of Xing @ 128kb/s vs the real CD. If you can't tell the difference / don't care about the difference, use it, since it's the fastest.
Personally, the quality bugged me, and I used a program with the lastest Fraunhofer encoder in it (which does not have the frequency cap on it). There are a number available, but unfortunately they're all windows-based. It was *very* difficult for me to tell the difference between the original source file and the files encoded at 128 with the high quality setting turned on.
Of course, using this setting, Fraunhofer encodes at less than 1x, so it's pretty essential to set up some sort of batched mechanism where you can rip and fill your HD with unencoded wavs and let the encoder chew on them while you're sleeping. Otherwise, you'll be spending a LOT of time in front of the box switching out CD's. Actually, you will anyway, but you can get a lot more rips done in a short amount of time if you're not waiting for the encode.
As far as CD-ROMs go, I can't recommend the ASUS 40x drive more highly- it rips consistently at 5x-10x without a single error that I've heard so far in my 200+ CD collection. There are faster drives out there, but they don't come as cheap- about $50. Well worth the money, especially if you consider how much time you will spend encoding a collection of any size.
I believe that the 4.x Notes clients on UNIX are only certified for "Administration", meaning that they don't do any QA for general use. I honestly couldn't recommend them for regular use of any kind.
I'm guessing that they're planning to run the *client* on NT using Citrix or something to display it to the UNIX users via X or a Java ICA client. Notes UNIX clients have always sucked, so NT is the only real solution if you've got to have the full client.
Compaq / Digital professional services deploy and manage virtually all of the largest Exchange deployments- once you get above a certain deployment size, the requirements for maintaining the system require extremely specialized and arcane knowledge that (apparently) only they have. MS actually has structured the MS Exchange support contracts so that above a certain deployment size, you pretty much have to use Digital, or you won't get any support from Microsoft.
So, unless you're willing to fork over the $$$$ for consultants from Digital to come and build the whole thing for you, I'd avoid Exchange like the plague for a project this size.
I've seen this again and again. It's incomprehensible to some people that there are motivations beyond making a ton of $$$ in the world. Anyone else see the irony in this attitude showing up in a place so focused on open source software? I bet folks like Linus and ESR could be making a lot more dough if that's what they wanted to do.
Worst example of a money tunnel-vision perspective I've seen was on one of those Robert X. Cringly documentaries about the early days of the net. There was a venture capitalist talking about how utterly stupid the founders of Cisco were for selling out early on... how much the stock has gone up since then. Then we find out that they each netted over $100 million at the time. Today, I guarantee you that they're doing whatever they want, and that having 10x as much money probably wouldn't change things much.
I'm guessing Rob and Co. made out well enough to do what they want. It's not our place to dis them for having the values they do.
So what if it's not e-ink? E-ink isn't any better for notarized documents. The key here is that while some use of paper is permanent (records, legal documents, etc..) a LOT of it is transient.
This is true in most business environments today. Most premanent records these days are stored electronically. It's stuff like agendas, faxed plane ticket confirmations, meeting presentations, etc... In my personal case, it's a lot of stuff I printed for use where my laptop is inconvenient (which is pretty often).
I've seen people kill a whole ream of paper printing presentations for a small meeting where everyone just chucks them afterwards. Better to chuck them into a "reuse" bin. It's a way of getting to that "paperless" office without having to kick people from their paper addiction. Even with the reuse, it will probably be years before this stuff is justifiable on a purely financial basis, but it would save a lot of trees. I'm betting e-ink will always be too expensive for this sort of use.
Another possible benefit is security. If I understand how these things are designed, it would be impossible to read them after they're erased, unlike most magnetic media which is really hard to completely wipe clean. Shredding paper is less than ideal... the strip-style shredders will protect against casual evesdropping, but not from someone who's determined (and patient).
Although Linux doesn't have a PR agency, there's still the same kind of spin happening in this thread. Which (among the 2+ responses) is "MS has sacrificed stability/quality for performance". Lots of discussion about bypassing the HAL, super-secret internal MS interfaces, etc...
But we need to be careful. If you'll note, the article notes that Samba won in the earlier SMB tests tests because there was a performance hit in NT due to the transaction log. Which is a stability / robustness feature that Linux simply lacks, and would be better off having if availability and fault-tolerance are the primary design goal.
We're treading on dangerous ground... PR is like a game of chess, and the community needs to be careful about spouting out this kind of spin which can quickly become a rallying point and then proven foolish if it isn't well-though through.
Disclaimer: I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've been reading a lot of books on this recently, and there are huge differences between computer and brain storage that make this kind of measure meaningless.
First, the "write" operation is highly dependent on how you experience an event. You can't be fully, simultaneously aware of every input- the brain is an excellent signal filter, and only processes those aspects of the environment you are focused on. But there's also an "interest" component- even if you are really paying attention an input, the aspects of it that you find important will be what you remember. Example- there was a study where a researcher asked workers in a museum about a particular painting they all saw on a regular basis. No two people described it the same way- some described the colors, others the emotions they felt as a result of the content, still others the execution of the painting and the specific stylistic elements. And what they remembered correlated closely to what it was about the painting they were "interested" in as part of their job- the curator's recollection (style, context, etc..) was very different from the guy who cleaned it (complicated, hard-to-clean frame).
Secondly, a very important aspect of remembering is uniqueness- something distinctive about a memory that allows you to get a "handle" on it later. It's also thought that multiple, similar experiences tend to blur each other and reinforce the common elements between experiences. For example, I can tell you exactly how I get to work and what lanes I prefer to use, but I can't tell you the exact sequence of lane changes I made on any specific trip.
Third, the brain has a very powerful reconstruction mechanism. It's kinda like dinosaur skeleton reconstruction. Just as a paleontologist can fairly accurately reconstruct an entire skeleton from a relatively small number of bones (or bone fragments) your brain pulls together and reconstructs the few bits of a specific experience that were stored and synthesizes a more detailed rememberance from the fuzzier "generalized" remembrances to give you the impression of remembering much more detail than you actually stored.
This all contributes to explaining why it is so difficult for humans to remember "digital" data. For most of us, there's very little that's interesting, unique, or distinctive about the numbers in a sequence. Mnemonists with apparently infinite abilities to recall details generally have a learned or innate mechanism by which they create unique, distinctive symbols for number sequences which make it possible for them to remember them. In the most highly-developed cases, these symbols encompass every sense- sight, sound, taste, texture, smell.
But such people are often cognitively lost in details... they can't deal with concepts easily, and can't abstract over information they have taken in, since they are so overwhelmed by the distinctiveness and richness of the details. As are computers, which know nothing except detail. So the "lossiness" of the human memory actually serves a useful purpose, and is a large part of what makes us "intelligent" relative to a piece of silicon.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not get sloppy here. The kernel which OS X and NextStep run on is the Mach kernel, written at Carnegie Mellon. It bears little or no resemblance to the BSD kernel.
In a microkernel, what we'd traditionally think of as a "kernel" is reduced to code supporting a set of abstractions for tasks, threads, memory objects, messages, and ports. Things like file systems, networking code, etc... are all implemented in user space using formal message passing to communicate with the "kernel". As a rule of thumb, if it can be implemented in a platform-independent manner, it's not in kernel space.
Mach is actually "OS Neutral". However, rather than having to port all of the system libraries of an OS to use this new, extremely different kernel interface, it's usually easier to write code which implements a the kernel API of another OS. Here's the BSD tie-in: BSD is one of the OS "personalities" available for Mach. Someone has done the work for a Linux personality too (MkLinux). In this sense, OS X is not BSD at all- the kernel code is completely different. On the other hand, it will include a full BSD 4.4lite environment of system programs and utilities, and uses much of the BSD kernel code to implment filesystem, networking, etc... that is "outside" the kernel.
What I don't know is what API the bulk of OS X is based on. Perhaps the different run time environments / programming models used by OS X (Carbon, Cocoa, etc...) are using diffent base kernel APIs. I'm guessing they didn't port all the old MacOS stuff to the BSD personality- it would make more sense to write a MacOS personality for Mach. How about Cocoa- does anyone know if the new / NextSteppish stuff has the BSD kernel API under it?
Print screen requires that the OS can read the bits in the clear. Because this is intended for copy protection, it will likely only be used for movies. Which means that the OS doesn't necessarily need to have access to the clear, unencrypted data so that "print screen" will work. The DVD decoder could output encrypted data to be stored in the display buffers and sent as is to the monitor. On a "normal" monitor, it would appear as garbage. On an Intel-licensed monitor, you'd see the movie.
Of course, this is all speculation, but I'm guessing there wouldn't be a hole that big...
The main use of this kind of technology would be copy protection. Let's say that the DVD encryption standard is improved to the point that it is unbreakable (hah!), and the only way to watch DVD's is with a legitimately licensed DVD decoder.
In order for you to watch this DVD, at some point the bits have to be decrypted and put onto the screen in front of you. MPAA and co. are scared that if you're clever enough pirate, you'd find a way to grab those bits between the decrypt and the display.
This is a pretty reasonable concern if you're an agressive paranoid about copy protection. Assuming the bad guy has a good MP3 decoder, grabbing the bits off of a digital display output for an LCD monitor would give you an extremely high quality reproduction of a movie. With standardization of digital display outputs, there's a potential for someone to legally build and sell a "black box" device for this purpose.
Thus, the need to encrypt all the way to the LCD monitor. If the decrypt happens inside the monitor, it's much, much more difficult to grab the clean bits.
Because the holders of the display encryption technology copywrites would only license it to authorized monitor manufacturers, there'd be no legitimate, legal devices on the market which could bypass it. There's no "standard" interface through which the clear signal runs, so getting around the encryption would require reverse engineering of specific monitor designs, and you'd end up with something that only worked for a specific monitor model.
I wonder when we'll see standards for encryption of audio signals all the way out to the speakers...
I'm with a company that IPO'd last year, and the restrictions on what a public company can say are tremendous. Basically, they can't share substantive information with any specific group- they have to share it with everybody in the world at once. So, it's basically impossible for him to say something straightforward and specific about any future plans, until they're ready for "the announcement". It would be impossible for him to give a straightforward answer on AMD- clearly, VA supporting AMD would be a BIG DEAL, and he couldn't say anything about it one way or the other until it's official.
I guarantee that post was checked by a lawyer before it was posted here.
I've not really dug into this stuff, but from a cursory glance, isn't it true that the reverse engineering of the encryption algorithm is being treated separately from the "intellectual property" that is the master encryption key that is necessary to encode the disks?
If this is true, AND the main issue is that this key was gleaned from the object code of a licensed software DVD player, why can't one get around this issue by brute-forcing the key? I thought it was only 40 bits. Then it would be a "pure" reverse engineer, and not not be reliant on this supposedly stolen piece of intellectual property?
Or have I missed some details in my skimming of the issues?
I took a compiler class in college, but only remember enough to be curioius, and am hoping someone who knows what they're talking about could answer.
Compilers do a lot of compile-time reasoning to try to predict what happens at run time, optimizing both register use and instuction order. However, this is not done solely based on the ISA- there are significant assumptions about how the processor actually executes instructions.
Crusoe, in optimizing execution, has the benefit of *knowing* what's happening at run time, as opposed to a normal compiler that has to guess about it at compile time. Also, because the x86 ISA is implemented in software, they could do all sorts of crazy stuff beyond instruction reordering. For example, if the compiler guessed wrong about what set of values to keep in the registers, the code morphing software might be able map hardware registers in Crusoe to values that were being sent to memory in the original code.
Which is all well and good. But given that there now are two astonishingly different execution models for x86 code, what are compiler writers supposed to do? Is the amount of information that a run-time optimizer has so much better than a compile-time optimizer that the compiler guys should just give up? Or do the constraints on the complexity of run-time algorithms (they've got to be *fast*) mean that compiler optimization is still worthwhile? If so, how will compiler authors cope with the potentially vast differences in optimizing for Intel vs Crusoe? Will we be seeing a Crusoe-opimization flag in gcc?
More questions than answers...
You are absolutely correct that the monopolistic elements of this merger are completely different than Microsoft's. But it could be even more threatening.
Here's why: Microsoft's monopoly gives it an incredible amount of control over the IT industry that enables it to squeeze out competitive products, keeping prices up and lowering the quality of software available to John Q. Public. This is pretty bad, but realize it's pretty much limited to software.
Time Warner / AOL merger is about control of information. At the same time that the means of information distribution are becoming more global, bashing through cultural barriers (exporting American "culture" everywhere), the number of entities in control of the production of this information and content is shrinking rapidly to a small, oligopolistic group. So we've got an increasingly smaller number of entities controlling the information consumed by an increasingly large amount of the world. This scares me a lot more than OS choice.
The stakes here are much higher. It's easy to have a healthy, democratic society without cheap, effective computer software. It's much harder to have one without free communication and public awareness of critical issues. As the number of truly independent media outlets shrinks, the more sanitized, corporately correct and sensational our primary sources of information become.
So while AOL / TW doesn't have the absolute control over a single product that Microsoft does, it (along with Disney, GE, etc...) has a lot more control over a fundamental part of our society's basic infrastructure (the media) than any one entity should. Which we should all be very concerned about.
I can't disagree with you about it's importance, but I just can't see birth control as a "gadget". To me, gadgets have some sort of "active" function, and most birth control mechanisms could best be described as a "substance". Maybe an IUD would qualify as a gadget, but it's properties are primarily chemical, if I understand them.
Of course, some of the other things on that list are stretching the limits of the term "gadget"...
MS's public face is one thing, but my experience has been that in private meetings their culture is one of pretty heavy self-criticism. I'm no MS advocate, but in my work life I interact with folks at MS pretty regularly, and they can be brutally honest internally. I'm guessing it's one of the reasons they've been successful.
As to the article, I'm guessing the PR people rightly guessed that there's not a lot of risk admitting something didn't work due to unexpected popularity. "Why, there were many more users than even *we* could predict!"
I saw the show while at InternetWorld. It was quite bizarre- in the middle of the downstairs 2nd-class booth space, there was a giant open area with a runway. The "company" sponsoring the show (InfoCharms) is a startup straight out of MIT that obviously hasn't hired any marketing people yet: the "booth" was littered with product concepts presented low-budget academia style.
/. already.
:-)
Besides a lot of skin, what was shown was a combination of bizarre fashion-industry interpretation of "futuristic" clothing with a definite retro spin, costumes from "futuristic" movies and tv shows, concept device mockups, and real wearable computers. The latter were few and far between, and nothing that hasn't been discussed to death on
The show was fun to watch, if only for seeing two amazingly different worlds colliding. The fashion people seemed to waver between excitement about being on the "leading edge" of something potentially huge and a patronizing smugness about bringing something hip to the poor, uncultured geek heathen. I think some of the attendees were genuinely interested in wearables, but the models definitely were a primary attraction. The pictures really don't do justice to the skimpiness of many of the women's outfits.
The bad guys always seemed to lock them up in a room handily appointed with welding / cutting torches and an abundance of materials to create anything from armored vehicles to oxygen bottle missiles.
.plan comes together!
I love it when a
This is definitely an "MIT-style" hack- it does not involve computers, but is firmly embedded in the folklore of Rice University.
The Rice Campus is built around a large, open "quad" surrounded by six of the major buildings on campus. In the center of the quad is a statue of William Marsh Rice, who provided the money for the school to get started. The statue is a slightly life-sized bronze of "Willy" sitting in a very large chair. I'm sure it weighs several tons, and is on top of a square stone bier over six feet tall which allegedly contains WMR's remains. (See here for a picture).
One morning in the late 80's, the students awoke to discover that Willy's statue had been perfectly rotated 180 degrees, with no trace of the equipment used to do it.
It turns out that a group of engineering and architecture students had built some sort of inexpensive tripod-like "crane" that was lightweight, portable, and could be assembled *very* quickly. There were some nice subtlelties to the hack:
1. The entire rig could be carried in the back of a pickup
2. Willy is illuminated by a bright mercury vapor light at night. The students started turning the light off at 2:00am for a week prior to the planned rotation to reduce suspicion.
3. Before the actual rotation, the students did a practice run on a previous night, where the statue was simply lifted a couple of inches off the pedestal and set back down again. Which means they effectively got away with it twice.
One of the more humorous parts of the story was about what happened afterwards. The administration was *not amused*, and hired a professional contractor to turn the statue back around. The contractor damaged the statue in the process, and the university billed the students for the whole thing.
Of course, they didn't have any money, so they created a tee-shirt about the rotation. They sold so many that they not only paid the bill, but netted an additional $7,000.
Today, the statue is firmly anchored to it's base.
Can any other Rice alums fill in the details I missed?
I take issue with the way you have grouped voluntary childlessness with a lot of other baggage from your preference for platonic relationships. My wife and I have been married for 5 child-free years. It's a mutual decision that we've never had a disagreement about.
You've described a life where you have to make very few compromises- you game when you want, you bathe when you want, you whack off when you want. You have no committments- you are totally your own person, moving through life without any attachments coming between you and what you want to do. To some extent, I can understand the appeal of that. I gave up a lot of that kind of freedom when we "tied the knot".
The thing is, it was a small price to pay for the immense rewards of a *mutually* committed relationship. To put it simply, I *know* that I'm always going to have someone at my back. Someone who is looking out for me, pushing me to be a better person, helping me grow. And it goes the other way, too... I find it immensely rewarding to do the same for her. And the best part is that it's for life. (Yes, I know not all marriages work this way. Mine happens to, and I feel incredibly blessed that it does.)
But we don't have a minivan. We leave town whenever we want. I can leave computer parts lying around without worring about seeing them on a medical X-ray the next day. Most importantly, we enjoy having a lot of time for ourselves. We would have to give a lot of this up if we have kids.
From what you've written, it sounds to me like you've developed a very stereotypical viewpoint of women (they all want children) and mutually-committed relationships (biological manifest destiny). Maybe it's what's right for you. Before I found the right person, I would have been horrified at the idea of making the sacrifices I have. After I found her, I discovered that there were other things that were important to me, so changing was not a sacrifice.
My point is, don't knock something until you've tried it. Coding and gaming may be what you are optimizing your life for now, but that's based on your current preferences. You may discover some day that there are other things that you enjoy more. Unless you open yourself to that possibility, you'll never know, and could miss out on something wonderful.
And yes, I apply this to myself. My wife and I are keeping an open mind about kids, even though it's not what we want now. Who knows... anything can happen. I just hate to see people who aren't willing to consider that.
The problem with air resistance is not that it would merely slow your launch vehicle down. The problem is that your spacecraft would be doing a killer impression of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man long before it got into orbit.
Shielding works OK for re-entry vehicles when you've got a nice, thin upper atmosphere to slow you down before you get to the thick stuff. Something tells me that surviving orbital velocities near sea-level is going to require something more substantial than ceramic tiles.
We've all heard about the "PC fridge" with the display on the door. Looks like that's missing the real goldmine: *networked toilets*. Yessir, according to this thread, there's a HUGE market of multitasking fanatics who want aren't content to "do their business" without a steady supply of computer generated content.
;-)
Of course, this only addresses one of the two primary uses of paper in this setting... but I am NOT going there...
This has been hinted at in a few postings here, but I want to emphasize that there's a BIG difference between how easy things are to learn vs how easy they are to use once you know them well.
Windows is much easier to learn than Linux. Sit pretty much anyone down who knows how to mouse, and (for example, an experienced Mac user) and they'll probably be able to get a lot of things done. The reason is that the GUI provides a lot of context for you- look at an empty screen, and there's a big start button that will lead you to almost everything that's useful on the computer with nice hierarchical labeling.
This does NOT mean that Windows is perfect in this regard- knowing to move a little box with a wire sticking out of it to make an arrow on the screen point at something is a new concept for a LOT of people. But it's possible for a reasonably computer literate person to use without reading any documentation.
It is not possible to find most of the useful things on your average Linux box by pointing and clicking. Yes, it *can* be set up this way for "normal" end-user tasks if someone knows what they are doing comes along and puts all of the right things in (for example) the KDE menuing system. But putting anything new onto the machine (or doing serious reconfiguration work) requires a lot more knowledge than you're likely to get by pointing and clicking. Even finding the right docs can be a real challenge.
But this is all about the first time you use a system. What about the 100th time? If you're a patient user and have taken the time to learn what to do, the problem changes entirely from "how do I find things" to "how do I get to what I need efficiently". IF you know Linux, it's very efficient to get around in. The command namespace is flat- there is no hierarchical set of menus to click through to get to what you need, so every command is at your fingertips if it's in your brain. Most things can be automated with scripting if you know what you're doing, and if typing three keystrokes to get your favorite text editor open (vi) is too much, you can alias it down to two.
My point is that "usability" is not a simple scale with things that are "usable" and things that aren't. A lot of you who love Linux today (including me) would hate some of the changes that would be required to make it more friendly for newbies, because it would sacrifice one kind of usability for another. And no, you can't always have it both ways... some of the properties of Linux that make it so powerful (customization) also fundamentally decrease the newbie-friendliness.
It seems to be on the index page now, with the new headline.
/. censors stories.
It bugs me that some people jump so quickly to the conclusion that "big brother" is censoring slashdot when it probably was just a technical issue. Just apply Occam's Razor, and think about how often there are "glitches" compared to how often
And I'm glad they caught the idiot. Even if you can rationalize the stuff that happened in the chatroom as "role playing" that ended when he showed up in person. Do you think he was expecting to find someone that was "role playing" with him?
Do a listening test of Xing @ 128kb/s vs the real CD. If you can't tell the difference / don't care about the difference, use it, since it's the fastest.
Personally, the quality bugged me, and I used a program with the lastest Fraunhofer encoder in it (which does not have the frequency cap on it). There are a number available, but unfortunately they're all windows-based. It was *very* difficult for me to tell the difference between the original source file and the files encoded at 128 with the high quality setting turned on.
Of course, using this setting, Fraunhofer encodes at less than 1x, so it's pretty essential to set up some sort of batched mechanism where you can rip and fill your HD with unencoded wavs and let the encoder chew on them while you're sleeping. Otherwise, you'll be spending a LOT of time in front of the box switching out CD's. Actually, you will anyway, but you can get a lot more rips done in a short amount of time if you're not waiting for the encode.
As far as CD-ROMs go, I can't recommend the ASUS 40x drive more highly- it rips consistently at 5x-10x without a single error that I've heard so far in my 200+ CD collection. There are faster drives out there, but they don't come as cheap- about $50. Well worth the money, especially if you consider how much time you will spend encoding a collection of any size.
I believe that the 4.x Notes clients on UNIX are only certified for "Administration", meaning that they don't do any QA for general use. I honestly couldn't recommend them for regular use of any kind.
I'm guessing that they're planning to run the *client* on NT using Citrix or something to display it to the UNIX users via X or a Java ICA client. Notes UNIX clients have always sucked, so NT is the only real solution if you've got to have the full client.
Compaq / Digital professional services deploy and manage virtually all of the largest Exchange deployments- once you get above a certain deployment size, the requirements for maintaining the system require extremely specialized and arcane knowledge that (apparently) only they have. MS actually has structured the MS Exchange support contracts so that above a certain deployment size, you pretty much have to use Digital, or you won't get any support from Microsoft.
So, unless you're willing to fork over the $$$$ for consultants from Digital to come and build the whole thing for you, I'd avoid Exchange like the plague for a project this size.
I've seen this again and again. It's incomprehensible to some people that there are motivations beyond making a ton of $$$ in the world. Anyone else see the irony in this attitude showing up in a place so focused on open source software? I bet folks like Linus and ESR could be making a lot more dough if that's what they wanted to do.
Worst example of a money tunnel-vision perspective I've seen was on one of those Robert X. Cringly documentaries about the early days of the net. There was a venture capitalist talking about how utterly stupid the founders of Cisco were for selling out early on... how much the stock has gone up since then. Then we find out that they each netted over $100 million at the time. Today, I guarantee you that they're doing whatever they want, and that having 10x as much money probably wouldn't change things much.
I'm guessing Rob and Co. made out well enough to do what they want. It's not our place to dis them for having the values they do.
So what if it's not e-ink? E-ink isn't any better for notarized documents. The key here is that while some use of paper is permanent (records, legal documents, etc..) a LOT of it is transient.
This is true in most business environments today. Most premanent records these days are stored electronically. It's stuff like agendas, faxed plane ticket confirmations, meeting presentations, etc... In my personal case, it's a lot of stuff I printed for use where my laptop is inconvenient (which is pretty often).
I've seen people kill a whole ream of paper printing presentations for a small meeting where everyone just chucks them afterwards. Better to chuck them into a "reuse" bin. It's a way of getting to that "paperless" office without having to kick people from their paper addiction. Even with the reuse, it will probably be years before this stuff is justifiable on a purely financial basis, but it would save a lot of trees. I'm betting e-ink will always be too expensive for this sort of use.
Another possible benefit is security. If I understand how these things are designed, it would be impossible to read them after they're erased, unlike most magnetic media which is really hard to completely wipe clean. Shredding paper is less than ideal... the strip-style shredders will protect against casual evesdropping, but not from someone who's determined (and patient).
Although Linux doesn't have a PR agency, there's still the same kind of spin happening in this thread. Which (among the 2+ responses) is "MS has sacrificed stability/quality for performance". Lots of discussion about bypassing the HAL, super-secret internal MS interfaces, etc...
But we need to be careful. If you'll note, the article notes that Samba won in the earlier SMB tests tests because there was a performance hit in NT due to the transaction log. Which is a stability / robustness feature that Linux simply lacks, and would be better off having if availability and fault-tolerance are the primary design goal.
We're treading on dangerous ground... PR is like a game of chess, and the community needs to be careful about spouting out this kind of spin which can quickly become a rallying point and then proven foolish if it isn't well-though through.
Disclaimer: I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've been reading a lot of books on this recently, and there are huge differences between computer and brain storage that make this kind of measure meaningless.
:-)
First, the "write" operation is highly dependent on how you experience an event. You can't be fully, simultaneously aware of every input- the brain is an excellent signal filter, and only processes those aspects of the environment you are focused on. But there's also an "interest" component- even if you are really paying attention an input, the aspects of it that you find important will be what you remember. Example- there was a study where a researcher asked workers in a museum about a particular painting they all saw on a regular basis. No two people described it the same way- some described the colors, others the emotions they felt as a result of the content, still others the execution of the painting and the specific stylistic elements. And what they remembered correlated closely to what it was about the painting they were "interested" in as part of their job- the curator's recollection (style, context, etc..) was very different from the guy who cleaned it (complicated, hard-to-clean frame).
Secondly, a very important aspect of remembering is uniqueness- something distinctive about a memory that allows you to get a "handle" on it later. It's also thought that multiple, similar experiences tend to blur each other and reinforce the common elements between experiences. For example, I can tell you exactly how I get to work and what lanes I prefer to use, but I can't tell you the exact sequence of lane changes I made on any specific trip.
Third, the brain has a very powerful reconstruction mechanism. It's kinda like dinosaur skeleton reconstruction. Just as a paleontologist can fairly accurately reconstruct an entire skeleton from a relatively small number of bones (or bone fragments) your brain pulls together and reconstructs the few bits of a specific experience that were stored and synthesizes a more detailed rememberance from the fuzzier "generalized" remembrances to give you the impression of remembering much more detail than you actually stored.
This all contributes to explaining why it is so difficult for humans to remember "digital" data. For most of us, there's very little that's interesting, unique, or distinctive about the numbers in a sequence. Mnemonists with apparently infinite abilities to recall details generally have a learned or innate mechanism by which they create unique, distinctive symbols for number sequences which make it possible for them to remember them. In the most highly-developed cases, these symbols encompass every sense- sight, sound, taste, texture, smell.
But such people are often cognitively lost in details... they can't deal with concepts easily, and can't abstract over information they have taken in, since they are so overwhelmed by the distinctiveness and richness of the details. As are computers, which know nothing except detail. So the "lossiness" of the human memory actually serves a useful purpose, and is a large part of what makes us "intelligent" relative to a piece of silicon.
Of course, I'd like to have it both ways...