I know next to nothing about DNA but the term junk DNA seems... wrong. First of all contrast the articles in the 6 or so URLs listed. Only one referred to them as junk DNA, this sounds more like the reporters lack of understanding or bias than something the scientist said.
Second, consider a gene as an information exchange mechanism. Most forms of information exchange include some amount of material that isn't essential to the message but can't really be classified as junk either. It may be redundancy, it may be for error detection or correction or it may be for clarification.
Run an estimate of the actual needed text in the average paragraph written or spoken in English. The percentage that is 100% essential is pretty astonishinly small. It's a bit higher for a text but a bit lower for a novel. Mathematical proofs are pretty concentrated information but consider what happens if a little bit of information is transmitted wrong, say a sign is reversed. It's difficult to recover from it.
Likewise I think a 100% essential gene would be very difficult. Any random genetic damage would have impact. Gene replication would have to be absolutely exact and so on.
As I stated, I don't know anything about genes or DNA, but from an information theory standpoint calling 'unused' DNA junk seems wrong.
I would like to learn more about genes though, can anybody recommend a good progression of texts on the subject? Something to take somebody from absolute layman to at least having a general idea of the subject?
During World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbour the Japanese were a bit annoyed that the US could attack the Japanese mainland but Japan couldn't reciprocate. It wasn't logistically possible to mount a traditional attack against the United States. Japan did know of the jet stream while America and its allies did not. The way they exploited it is a macabre but grade A hack.
They started a cottage industry building balloons from rice paper and potato based glue. These 32 foot balloons were filled with lighter than air hydrogen gas and released. Inside the balloons were a series of aneroid barometer controlled switches which would fire off in series whenever the balloon fell below a certain altitude. The first N switches dropped ballast allowing the balloon to rise again and continue on down the jet stream. The last switch would drop incendary devices as well as ignire a demolition charge to destroy any evidence.
Japan's intention was to start massive forest fires. Fortunately they didn't quite understand the climate on the west coast and were launched during the rainy season. Only a few people were ever harmed by these balloons.
This is (as far as I know) not common knowledge. The American media agreed with the Military to suppress information about the balloons. After a minister's wife and five kids were killed by one of the balloons some information was released. They needed to avoid a mass panic however, they were worried that panic would result from fears of anthrax laden balloons raining down on US cities.
Many years ago Dan Farmer authored a paper with a title similar to "Improving Your Computer Security By Breaking Into It". The paper illustrated a number of means of hacking into a system, some of which sadly are still very possible today. His intention wasn't to be the first enabler for script kiddies, it was actually to make the internet a better place by improving security. His thesis was that the best way to counter these attacks was to learn to think like your attacker. He didn't have any hidden motives. It wasn't like a lot of self-proclaimed security experts who say they're producing material to enhance security with a few concealed winks and nods to the script kiddies. He went on to write SATAN later. Apparently educating system administrators and programmers didn't help. Buffer overflows were still rampant, critical security patches weren't applied and the internet itself was rapidly growing. It wasn't just touching the most wired of the geeks anymore but was starting to become part of the general publics experience. SATAN was an automated audit system. Some moron at SGI even fired him over this.
Both of these systems could be exploited and abused and both of them were. Dan's intentions were still honorable though. Yes, it was possible that they could fall into the wrong hands but both items in the right hands could help armour your systems against these attacks. It's a failure of system administrators everywhere that script-kiddies COULD use these tools against them.
The responsibility here is firmly planted on two groups. Foremost are the abusers of the tools. Just because somebody leaves the doors open doesn't give anybody the right to exploit it. The administrators who were compromised by things which were EXPLICITLY EXPLAINED OR AUDITED also bear some responsibility to any users who were effected. Ideally I'd love to see the day where script kiddies are locked away or otherwise punished (I loved somebodies suggestion the other day of forced community service teaching computer skills) and administrators that are proven to have not been dilligent in applying patches were open to financial repurcussions.
Some groups write scripts for the sole use of script kiddies. They may claim they're writing security tools but I find it hard to believe them when comments in the source code proclaim "// n4m3 0f z1t3 t0 b3 0wn3d" so they're liable. They're purposely producing tools to enable computer crimes.
Cray is a sliver of its former self. When SGI purchased them there were over 4000 employees, they had their own semiconductor fab, PCB house and manufacturing operations. Now they're under 1000 employees, have no fab, no PCB or manufacturing operations.
Beowulf clusters still can not touch the Cray supercomputer market unless vector processors were sold to markets where there wasn't a good match in the first place. The price/performance of a beowulf cluster is much higher than any Cray machine that has been built, but a vector processor running the right codes can make the difference between something being unfeasible or feasible.
This sounds great. The only problem is that not everyone has the bandwidth to download a few hundred megs. If they really wanted to keep track of how
The Linux part of Unreal Tournament won't be a couple hundred megabytes. All it will be is the executable. I've not actually played a game in ages but I'd be suprised if it was more than a few megabytes in size. Most of the data on a CD is well... data. Maps, graphics, sounds, voice,...
Before anybody starts bandering about the favourite rallying cries of either boycott or pirate the game consider how best to send them a pro-Linux message.
Wait till the Linux downloads are available, download them
Purchase the retail package
Send in your registration cards, make sure there is information that you're only playing the game because a Linux port is available.
The only things that matter to management is the bottom line. Boycotting or pirating Unreal Tournament won't accomplish anything, you just don't appear in the bottom line. Maybe nobody using Linux plays games, or maybe everybody boycotted us but there's not enough information to tell. We did sell stacks of copies to Windows users though.
Beyond registration a means of sending the message en masse would be useful as well. Something that says the only reason we the undersigned parted with money for Unreal Tournament was because a Linux port was available.
I've happened on this site before, it may have been posted to memepool or something similar. There was a lot of information on Scientology that Scientologists wouldn't find too flattering. A lot of it seemed so paranoid to me that I hoped it wasn't true, such as a list of ex-scientologists who later turned detractors and also later met an untimely demise. Given the rabid nature of a lot of the scientologists defending their cult I wouldn't be so sure however.
I don't see this as anything different than a review or expose however. This is no different than if George Lucas went after any bad Star Wars: The Phantom Menace reviews and had them yanked because they referred to LucasFilms or ILM's trademarks. For that matter its no different than if restraunts threatened legal action over poor restraunt reviews (or poor health department ratings).
What's so amazing to me is how incredibly stupid the scientologists and their lawyers are. There's a page that says all kinds of unfavourable things about them, the least of which is that they bully people who don't agree with scientology, and they bully them into being shut down. Nothing like providing proof of peoples opinions of you.
The dangerous thing about this as far as rights go is that while many think of the internet as the last bastion of freedom its really not even close. ISP's routinely take the easy way out when faced with any legal action or even public pressure.
Here's my question. If gaming companies are looking for evidence of Linux interest, why are they just looking at sales? Do not the download volumes of linux binaries also matter?
Why can't they say "well, uh there were 153,893 windows versions bought, and then 53,000 people turned in their coupons for the linux version... So we sold 100,893 windows versions."
The information that will enable game developers to make the business decision to port to Linux (or develop in Linux and port to Windows for that matter) is the number of additional sales that having a Linux port generates.
A simple example, a game is developed for both Windows and Linux. Buying either version allows you to download the other version for free.
100000 copies are sold. 90000 of those copies are for Windows, 10000 are for Linux. 20000 of the people who purchased the Windows version downloaded the free Linux version.
The developer will look at this and say that 100000 copies were sold while only 10000 copies were sold for Linux. This is actually accurate, the number of people who downloaded the Linux version doesn't matter one bit. Actually, to be more accurate the Linux version downloads don't give any information one way or the other on how much additional market share they earned due to the Linux port.
If the Linux version wasn't there and the 10000 Linux users won't buy anything not produced for Windows then they've sold 90000 copies. The expense of the Linux port earned an additional 10000 sales. The people who downloaded the Linux version are interpreted as Windows users who happen to occasionaly toy around with Linux, not additional market share.
Gore probably couldn't use it. I'm sure that Microsoft had its teeming team of lawyers run off and obtain patent and trademark protection for Microsoft Windows most used feature.
Thanks for a well written and insightful post. If DeCSS relied on leaked or stolen code and if the company had a US based presense then the utility itself is in question in the US though.
It's not (or shouldn't be) illegal just because it enables people to make copies of a DVD, even if those copies are accurate down to the last bit. Making personal copies is allowed under the Fair Use Act (or a string of words similar to that, don't have anything that mentions it near to me). So even though as a module DeCSS can be used either to make a Linux based DVD player or a copy machine, that in itself doesn't make it illegal (or restore its legal status if there is any basis to the ip infringement issues)
If DeCSS is free of any infringement and is a valid example of reverse engineeering then there is legal precedent. The use of the DeCSS module in a Linux based DVD viewer would then be legal as would the use of the DeCSS module in a Linux based copier.
What would be illegal would be the use of the copier to produce copies and redistribute them whether for free or for profit. This is where in a fair world the motion picture industry would focus its legal muscle.
The most interesting quote in the article I thought was this:
"While I was upset about Mindcraft for awhile, I took it as a more positive thing after I got past the personal injury to my pride," Torvalds said. "We just delved into it and fixed it. We took this benchmark as a way of saying, 'Yes, Linux is not the best at everything.' We fixed the area, and as a result, Linux is doing extremely well on those kind of benchmarks."
Contrast this to how the majority of the community reacted to the Mindcraft benchmark. Rather than moaning about its fairness or whether the playing ground was level or not he (and others) analyzed the kernel and improved its performance. That's the difference between a technically proficient leader and zealots.
I'd have to wonder about the intent of the patent itself. The NSA (or other government agencies, including agencies in other countries) aren't typically too forthcoming about the details of how they find information. There are a few potential reasons:
Commercial technologies are heading this way and they want to keep them away. This is a possibility. There's a huge amount of information to be extracted about people in conversations whether they're verbal or written. For people who spend time online this can be a significant source of information. Advertising agencies could use this information to extract profiles of online personalities and more effectively target information at them. Agencies such as the NSA could use this information for other means.
They've got the technology, are using it and want to increase paranoia among various groups the government feels the need to innocently threaten. Various anti-government militias and groups fall under this point.
They thought up the technology but don't have the enabling technology to do this. They also don't forsee having the enabling technology in the near or mid term future. This is similar to the point above. They might be attempting to pull a bluff and induce paranoia at the same time.
If the technology does exist it would be pretty frightening. Imagine being able to extract a list of subversive thoughts of a net entity as well as mixing it with other details: local postings to pinpoint location and possible affiliations; linguistic analysis to provide probable matches with other net entities; many things I can't think of.
First make sure that you aren't infringing on any of their copyrights or trademarks. The domain name itself is just a domain name and by itself can't violate any trademarks from what little I understand of copyright law. There are two things which may potentially be a problem on the page. The clock tower with "Purdue Online" to the right of it. Is that clock tower a trademark of Purdue University? The second thing is a bit silly but they might try to prove that you're diluting their trademark because you are providing search services for their students. I realize that it just provides an interface to their search engine and they still control who has access to it and that deep linking isn't illegal but this combined with the domain name could be used as evidence in a trademark infringement suit.
I'm not familiar with American universities but I would assume they've got a lot of money they can throw around at people so you can't safely assume the expense of a law suit would hold them back. Put a value on your time and decide if its best for you if you remove any links to official purdue services.
I'm not siding with them, I think they're behaving like trolls, but the act of having a lawsuit filed against you may be more aggravating then any moral victory would be.l
A move in this direction is probably necessary to Intel. First of all to keep its stock price up they need to exhibit growth. In the consumer space Intel can only grow as the market for computers grow, once that maeket saturates their growth would largely fall off. Investors and the street doesn't like to see this happen. They get all warm and fuzzy inside when their is quarter over quarter growth.
I'm not sure if Intel has tried entering the DSP market before or not, if they have I don't recall anything about it. One other potential growth market is embedded devices since just about everything except cheap toasters has a microcontroller in it. Historically Intel has not done real well in this market. Motorola dominates at the high end while Microchip dominates the low end.
The second reason is that general purpose microprocessors are becoming increasingly more DSP like. Most DSP algorithms break down to doing lots of multiply and accumulate instructions at their heart. If you can do these in a small number of cycles and pipeline the Hell out of it then you can do things like a fast fourier transform, the fast discrete cosine transform, FIR or IIR filters fast which is the heart of a lot of digital signal processing algorithms. These and other mathematical operations form a great deal of what makes a DSP a DSP. Recently interest in doing this fast in general purpose microprocessors has been happening for both graphics and audio algorithms.
I've got to wonder what the real angle on this is. What's the point of a "Microsoft store in a store"? It was a wise move for Apple, the alliance with CompUSA actually made software and hardware more available to a lot of people. In just about every store I've come across that sells software there's already a highly visible display unit with oodles of Microsoft software stacked up. So any market share they pick up will be miniscule (hard to get market share in the consumer arena when you're already at 98% or whatever) in exchange for 100 million dollars.
From the miniscule press release it sounds like they're trying to sell MS wireless and internet access but how many computers does Radio Shack really sell? Radio Shack isn't exactly the first place most people run to for finding an ISP either.
Microsoft doesn't usually make unwise marketing moves, so there's got to be an angle, I'm just not seeing it. Were there any other people trying to get their software or services in Radio Shack that Microsoft is effectively keeping out? Red Hat? Apple? AOL?
I don't respect or disrespect ESR. I use Open Source software based on its abilities, not on the political ideology of its proponents. If Open Source software had public proponents who could evangelize without introducing politics then it would spread like a virus.
There are enough facts to support that Open Source software in many cases is the right decision. An advocate is needed that will stick to "just the facts ma'am". This has been a brake on the acceptance of Open Source software for some time now. In the bad old days when I administered a SPARCstation network I was basically prohibited from installing even something as trivial as gzip because of the way the FSF rhetoric was slanted at the time. The license itself was relatively benign but administrators couldn't get past the rhetoric of RMS and others. They were worried that FSF would start a campaign against people who used Open Source software without GPLing everything they produced. This was bolstered by actions such as calling for a boycott on Apple because they were a 'closed' system (even though UNIX at the time was closed, Windows still is closed etc)
I'm not going to defend the People's Republic of China, a lot of their actions are indefensible. What I find highly annoying are political statements like "principles of the PRC are incompatible with the voluntary cooperation that is the spirit of the Open Source movement." It's great that ESR has an opinion and finds the PRC's track record reprehensible but to say that its incompatible with Open Source seems disingenious at best.
The incompatibility with voluntary cooperation would mean that Open Source software shouldn't be used by or in corporations as most definately are not about voluntary cooperation. So if he's going to condemn the PRC's use of Open Source software for being contrary to voluntary cooperation then he should also condemn IBM, SGI, Dell and anybody else who has recently jumped on the Open Source bandwagon. Sure, the mentioned companies haven't run over students with tanks, but thats not even what he seems to have referred to in his rant.
I'd also state that he has to openly rebuke a lot of the more vocal members of the Open Source community. Voluntary cooperation? A lot of people support piracy or leaked code as a means to an ends. That isn't voluntary cooperation.
TransMeta has been around long enough that silicon may be close if in fact test silicon isn't already there. Given TransMeta's reluctance to say anything at all regarding their product I'd say that if they do announce a processor on November 15th they'll also announce a relatively short time till actual delivery.
You don't need a fab to build a microprocessor. Many CPU's are built using third party fabrication resources such as the MIPS microprocessor.
In other articles (sorry, no references right now) it mentioned that the danger was that consumers could be tricked into accepting electronic documents because the acceptance could be buried in a contract the same way other things are buried in the fine print. In other words the bill was two parts 1) digital signatures are valid 2) digital contracts and amendmants from companies are valid.
The original alternative only covered 1) digital signatures are valid but was squashed mightily. A democratic provision 3) any agreement that the consumer will accept digital documents must be highly visible and seperate was also killed.
Firewire board: ADS technologies - 90.00 DV Camera: Sony TRV 310 - 750.00
Not cheap, but not out of line either, especially for the video camera. A Sony Hi8 is around 500 bucks. A cheap analog capture board can probably be had for 100 bucks or so.
Firewire drives are expensive but all the ones I've seen are geared to laptop users (fits in a pocket and no external power). You're paying a premium for features you don't need on a desktop or server.
Obviously keyboards and mice wouldn't normally benefit from a faster interface (Ooh, I can type at up to 500 words per minute now!!!) but there is a benefit to the motherboard itself though. A computer is roughly divided into two busses and everything else hangs off of these busses. The front side bus is where you hang memory off of and is a high speed bus with very tightly controlled electrical characterisics.
The peripheral bus is typically a PCI bus. Every other bus you see advertised is actually a chip which hangs off of this bus. More things hanging off means more capacitance as well as more electrical power. So parallel ports, serial ports, keyboard ports and mouse ports all have a cost associated with them. More capacitance means its more expensive to design a board that transmits signals at a given data rate. These chips also consume board real estate.
So by building a 21st century motherboard that has less devices hanging off of the PCI bus would be a good thing. The USB port is responsible for more general purpose signalling at up to 12 mb/s: keyboards, mice, graphics tablets and maybe a floppy. The firewire port is better for high bandwidth applications without requiring a dedicated PCI card: video cameras, some forms of storage. A hard drive interface probably won't be going away any time soon as their bandwidth usage can be greater than FireWire.
The FDD interface is unfortunately useful on Windows. I found out how useful when Windows decided it didn't like to operate this weekend. Since I didn't have a Windows Setup floppy I was forced reinstall. There may have been a way around it but since the only thing I use Windows for is occasionaly upgrading firmware I didn't lose anything except time.
Microsoft didn't directly hold a gun to consumers heads and say 'buy this'. What they did do was hold a gun to software developers heads and occasionaly pulled the trigger. In the case of Netscape they virtually crushed their business model by coming up with a competing product and releasing it at no cost. At the same time they offered rather lucrative insentives to ISPs and web services to provide links to Internet Explorer rather than Netscape. They've done the same things for online content serving as well by offering the serving technology for free. The problem is that once they've got sufficient market share to perpetuate the free ride goes away. They've used their dominance in software, not operating systems, to squash any competitors. You want to guarantee that a competing operating system never is more than a niche player? Refuse to port Microsoft Office for it. That cuts out about 90% of your possible market penetration. They've used these tactics to keep Apple at a market share level they're comfortable with.
With Internet Explorer quickly becoming the dominant browser it will be easy for them to integrate IE only features which will preclude other browsers from accessing services. Since they won't ever port their browser to say Linux that would be one more nail in the coffin on the desktop.
Contrast this to open source software. Suppose that the DOJ imposes restrictions on Microsoft such that Linux does become dominant. Linux can't exert the same coersion on the market because by design Linux and most of the software it runs is free. Be is free to take the hypothetical butt-kicking office application and port it to their operating system, so is Apple, so is Sun and so is any other company.
I can't think of anything ethical about war, though I will concede that war is sometimes required. I always feel a bit queasy when the military or politicians mention ethics though:
Targeting civilians is ethical, we're at war with the entire country not just the military or its leaders, besides they are probably aiding the war effort.
Targeting a specific person, say the resident dictator in charge is unethical. Heaven forbid this causes an assasination attempt against one of our leaders. Better to do a bombing run against a city and worry about terrorist acts.
Embargos are ok even though they almost exclusively impact civilians. Few of the upper caste ever go hungry despite very restrictive embargos.
Looking at ethics from my narrow viewpoint any hacking attempts that the military is capable of would be unethical. All they should be able to do is harm civilian companies since any important military operations should not be directly connected. Destabilizing the economy would harm civilians long before it'd harm the military.
I've got the A/V Producer 8 by UIEC and it controls everything... except for my Carver tuner. Apparently Carver uses a higher frequency for its I/R port which universal remotes don't use.
What it does control it controls admirably though.
I'd buy a Palm Pilot if I knew that it would be able to control my Carver CT-26v.
I think everybody saw this coming, it shouldn't be a suprise at all. I'm not sure what the outcome will be. The danger is that the content scrambling system for DVD was leaked. Anything derived from that is contaminated so the efforts to rewrite it were useless. The only way to create a legal implementation of something is via either reverse engineering or cleanroom techniques (or licensing, but that was out of the question in this case). This may mean that there can never be a GPL'd DVD decoder, the onus would be on the license holder to prove that they never saw the leaked technology. This may be difficult.
What some smart vendor should do at this point is create a Linux DVD driver, the time is probably right to make a lot of money (selling the only Linux compatible DVD solution) with a minimal effort.
Slashdot Mirror
I know next to nothing about DNA but the term junk DNA seems... wrong. First of all contrast the articles in the 6 or so URLs listed. Only one referred to them as junk DNA, this sounds more like the reporters lack of understanding or bias than something the scientist said.
Second, consider a gene as an information exchange mechanism. Most forms of information exchange include some amount of material that isn't essential to the message but can't really be classified as junk either. It may be redundancy, it may be for error detection or correction or it may be for clarification.
Run an estimate of the actual needed text in the average paragraph written or spoken in English. The percentage that is 100% essential is pretty astonishinly small. It's a bit higher for a text but a bit lower for a novel. Mathematical proofs are pretty concentrated information but consider what happens if a little bit of information is transmitted wrong, say a sign is reversed. It's difficult to recover from it.
Likewise I think a 100% essential gene would be very difficult. Any random genetic damage would have impact. Gene replication would have to be absolutely exact and so on.
As I stated, I don't know anything about genes or DNA, but from an information theory standpoint calling 'unused' DNA junk seems wrong.
I would like to learn more about genes though, can anybody recommend a good progression of texts on the subject? Something to take somebody from absolute layman to at least having a general idea of the subject?
During World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbour the Japanese were a bit annoyed that the US could attack the Japanese mainland but Japan couldn't reciprocate. It wasn't logistically possible to mount a traditional attack against the United States. Japan did know of the jet stream while America and its allies did not. The way they exploited it is a macabre but grade A hack.
They started a cottage industry building balloons from rice paper and potato based glue. These 32 foot balloons were filled with lighter than air hydrogen gas and released. Inside the balloons were a series of aneroid barometer controlled switches which would fire off in series whenever the balloon fell below a certain altitude. The first N switches dropped ballast allowing the balloon to rise again and continue on down the jet stream. The last switch would drop incendary devices as well as ignire a demolition charge to destroy any evidence.
Japan's intention was to start massive forest fires. Fortunately they didn't quite understand the climate on the west coast and were launched during the rainy season. Only a few people were ever harmed by these balloons.
This is (as far as I know) not common knowledge. The American media agreed with the Military to suppress information about the balloons. After a minister's wife and five kids were killed by one of the balloons some information was released. They needed to avoid a mass panic however, they were worried that panic would result from fears of anthrax laden balloons raining down on US cities.
Many years ago Dan Farmer authored a paper with a title similar to "Improving Your Computer Security By Breaking Into It". The paper illustrated a number of means of hacking into a system, some of which sadly are still very possible today. His intention wasn't to be the first enabler for script kiddies, it was actually to make the internet a better place by improving security. His thesis was that the best way to counter these attacks was to learn to think like your attacker. He didn't have any hidden motives. It wasn't like a lot of self-proclaimed security experts who say they're producing material to enhance security with a few concealed winks and nods to the script kiddies. He went on to write SATAN later. Apparently educating system administrators and programmers didn't help. Buffer overflows were still rampant, critical security patches weren't applied and the internet itself was rapidly growing. It wasn't just touching the most wired of the geeks anymore but was starting to become part of the general publics experience. SATAN was an automated audit system. Some moron at SGI even fired him over this.
Both of these systems could be exploited and abused and both of them were. Dan's intentions were still honorable though. Yes, it was possible that they could fall into the wrong hands but both items in the right hands could help armour your systems against these attacks. It's a failure of system administrators everywhere that script-kiddies COULD use these tools against them.
The responsibility here is firmly planted on two groups. Foremost are the abusers of the tools. Just because somebody leaves the doors open doesn't give anybody the right to exploit it. The administrators who were compromised by things which were EXPLICITLY EXPLAINED OR AUDITED also bear some responsibility to any users who were effected. Ideally I'd love to see the day where script kiddies are locked away or otherwise punished (I loved somebodies suggestion the other day of forced community service teaching computer skills) and administrators that are proven to have not been dilligent in applying patches were open to financial repurcussions.
Some groups write scripts for the sole use of script kiddies. They may claim they're writing security tools but I find it hard to believe them when comments in the source code proclaim "// n4m3 0f z1t3 t0 b3 0wn3d" so they're liable. They're purposely producing tools to enable computer crimes.
Cray is a sliver of its former self. When SGI purchased them there were over 4000 employees, they had their own semiconductor fab, PCB house and manufacturing operations. Now they're under 1000 employees, have no fab, no PCB or manufacturing operations.
Beowulf clusters still can not touch the Cray supercomputer market unless vector processors were sold to markets where there wasn't a good match in the first place. The price/performance of a beowulf cluster is much higher than any Cray machine that has been built, but a vector processor running the right codes can make the difference between something being unfeasible or feasible.
The Linux part of Unreal Tournament won't be a couple hundred megabytes. All it will be is the executable. I've not actually played a game in ages but I'd be suprised if it was more than a few megabytes in size. Most of the data on a CD is well... data. Maps, graphics, sounds, voice,
The only things that matter to management is the bottom line. Boycotting or pirating Unreal Tournament won't accomplish anything, you just don't appear in the bottom line. Maybe nobody using Linux plays games, or maybe everybody boycotted us but there's not enough information to tell. We did sell stacks of copies to Windows users though.
Beyond registration a means of sending the message en masse would be useful as well. Something that says the only reason we the undersigned parted with money for Unreal Tournament was because a Linux port was available.
I've happened on this site before, it may have been posted to memepool or something similar. There was a lot of information on Scientology that Scientologists wouldn't find too flattering. A lot of it seemed so paranoid to me that I hoped it wasn't true, such as a list of ex-scientologists who later turned detractors and also later met an untimely demise. Given the rabid nature of a lot of the scientologists defending their cult I wouldn't be so sure however.
I don't see this as anything different than a review or expose however. This is no different than if George Lucas went after any bad Star Wars: The Phantom Menace reviews and had them yanked because they referred to LucasFilms or ILM's trademarks. For that matter its no different than if restraunts threatened legal action over poor restraunt reviews (or poor health department ratings).
What's so amazing to me is how incredibly stupid the scientologists and their lawyers are. There's a page that says all kinds of unfavourable things about them, the least of which is that they bully people who don't agree with scientology, and they bully them into being shut down. Nothing like providing proof of peoples opinions of you.
For a 20/20 expose on Scientology go here, here, here or just click this for a Google search
The dangerous thing about this as far as rights go is that while many think of the internet as the last bastion of freedom its really not even close. ISP's routinely take the easy way out when faced with any legal action or even public pressure.
The information that will enable game developers to make the business decision to port to Linux (or develop in Linux and port to Windows for that matter) is the number of additional sales that having a Linux port generates.
A simple example, a game is developed for both Windows and Linux. Buying either version allows you to download the other version for free.
100000 copies are sold. 90000 of those copies are for Windows, 10000 are for Linux. 20000 of the people who purchased the Windows version downloaded the free Linux version.
The developer will look at this and say that 100000 copies were sold while only 10000 copies were sold for Linux. This is actually accurate, the number of people who downloaded the Linux version doesn't matter one bit. Actually, to be more accurate the Linux version downloads don't give any information one way or the other on how much additional market share they earned due to the Linux port.
If the Linux version wasn't there and the 10000 Linux users won't buy anything not produced for Windows then they've sold 90000 copies. The expense of the Linux port earned an additional 10000 sales. The people who downloaded the Linux version are interpreted as Windows users who happen to occasionaly toy around with Linux, not additional market share.
Gore probably couldn't use it. I'm sure that Microsoft had its teeming team of lawyers run off and obtain patent and trademark protection for Microsoft Windows most used feature.
Thanks for a well written and insightful post. If DeCSS relied on leaked or stolen code and if the company had a US based presense then the utility itself is in question in the US though.
It's not (or shouldn't be) illegal just because it enables people to make copies of a DVD, even if those copies are accurate down to the last bit. Making personal copies is allowed under the Fair Use Act (or a string of words similar to that, don't have anything that mentions it near to me). So even though as a module DeCSS can be used either to make a Linux based DVD player or a copy machine, that in itself doesn't make it illegal (or restore its legal status if there is any basis to the ip infringement issues)
If DeCSS is free of any infringement and is a valid example of reverse engineeering then there is legal precedent. The use of the DeCSS module in a Linux based DVD viewer would then be legal as would the use of the DeCSS module in a Linux based copier.
What would be illegal would be the use of the copier to produce copies and redistribute them whether for free or for profit. This is where in a fair world the motion picture industry would focus its legal muscle.
The most interesting quote in the article I thought was this:
"While I was upset about Mindcraft for awhile, I took it as a more positive
thing after I got past the personal injury to my pride," Torvalds said. "We just
delved into it and fixed it. We took this benchmark as a way of saying, 'Yes,
Linux is not the best at everything.' We fixed the area, and as a result, Linux
is doing extremely well on those kind of benchmarks."
Contrast this to how the majority of the community reacted to the Mindcraft benchmark. Rather than moaning about its fairness or whether the playing ground was level or not he (and others) analyzed the kernel and improved its performance. That's the difference between a technically proficient leader and zealots.
If the technology does exist it would be pretty frightening. Imagine being able to extract a list of subversive thoughts of a net entity as well as mixing it with other details: local postings to pinpoint location and possible affiliations; linguistic analysis to provide probable matches with other net entities; many things I can't think of.
First make sure that you aren't infringing on any of their copyrights or trademarks. The domain name itself is just a domain name and by itself can't violate any trademarks from what little I understand of copyright law. There are two things which may potentially be a problem on the page. The clock tower with "Purdue Online" to the right of it. Is that clock tower a trademark of Purdue University? The second thing is a bit silly but they might try to prove that you're diluting their trademark because you are providing search services for their students. I realize that it just provides an interface to their search engine and they still control who has access to it and that deep linking isn't illegal but this combined with the domain name could be used as evidence in a trademark infringement suit.
I'm not familiar with American universities but I would assume they've got a lot of money they can throw around at people so you can't safely assume the expense of a law suit would hold them back. Put a value on your time and decide if its best for you if you remove any links to official purdue services.
I'm not siding with them, I think they're behaving like trolls, but the act of having a lawsuit filed against you may be more aggravating then any moral victory would be.l
A move in this direction is probably necessary to Intel. First of all to keep its stock price up they need to exhibit growth. In the consumer space Intel can only grow as the market for computers grow, once that maeket saturates their growth would largely fall off. Investors and the street doesn't like to see this happen. They get all warm and fuzzy inside when their is quarter over quarter growth.
I'm not sure if Intel has tried entering the DSP market before or not, if they have I don't recall anything about it. One other potential growth market is embedded devices since just about everything except cheap toasters has a microcontroller in it. Historically Intel has not done real well in this market. Motorola dominates at the high end while Microchip dominates the low end.
The second reason is that general purpose microprocessors are becoming increasingly more DSP like. Most DSP algorithms break down to doing lots of multiply and accumulate instructions at their heart. If you can do these in a small number of cycles and pipeline the Hell out of it then you can do things like a fast fourier transform, the fast discrete cosine transform, FIR or IIR filters fast which is the heart of a lot of digital signal processing algorithms. These and other mathematical operations form a great deal of what makes a DSP a DSP. Recently interest in doing this fast in general purpose microprocessors has been happening for both graphics and audio algorithms.
I've got to wonder what the real angle on this is. What's the point of a "Microsoft store in a store"? It was a wise move for Apple, the alliance with CompUSA actually made software and hardware more available to a lot of people. In just about every store I've come across that sells software there's already a highly visible display unit with oodles of Microsoft software stacked up. So any market share they pick up will be miniscule (hard to get market share in the consumer arena when you're already at 98% or whatever) in exchange for 100 million dollars.
From the miniscule press release it sounds like they're trying to sell MS wireless and internet access but how many computers does Radio Shack really sell? Radio Shack isn't exactly the first place most people run to for finding an ISP either.
Microsoft doesn't usually make unwise marketing moves, so there's got to be an angle, I'm just not seeing it. Were there any other people trying to get their software or services in Radio Shack that Microsoft is effectively keeping out? Red Hat? Apple? AOL?
I don't respect or disrespect ESR. I use Open Source software based on its abilities, not on the political ideology of its proponents. If Open Source software had public proponents who could evangelize without introducing politics then it would spread like a virus.
There are enough facts to support that Open Source software in many cases is the right decision. An advocate is needed that will stick to "just the facts ma'am". This has been a brake on the acceptance of Open Source software for some time now. In the bad old days when I administered a SPARCstation network I was basically prohibited from installing even something as trivial as gzip because of the way the FSF rhetoric was slanted at the time. The license itself was relatively benign but administrators couldn't get past the rhetoric of RMS and others. They were worried that FSF would start a campaign against people who used Open Source software without GPLing everything they produced. This was bolstered by actions such as calling for a boycott on Apple because they were a 'closed' system (even though UNIX at the time was closed, Windows still is closed etc)
I'm not going to defend the People's Republic of China, a lot of their actions are indefensible. What I find highly annoying are political statements like "principles of the PRC are incompatible with the voluntary cooperation that is the spirit of the Open Source movement." It's great that ESR has an opinion and finds the PRC's track record reprehensible but to say that its incompatible with Open Source seems disingenious at best.
The incompatibility with voluntary cooperation would mean that Open Source software shouldn't be used by or in corporations as most definately are not about voluntary cooperation. So if he's going to condemn the PRC's use of Open Source software for being contrary to voluntary cooperation then he should also condemn IBM, SGI, Dell and anybody else who has recently jumped on the Open Source bandwagon. Sure, the mentioned companies haven't run over students with tanks, but thats not even what he seems to have referred to in his rant.
I'd also state that he has to openly rebuke a lot of the more vocal members of the Open Source community. Voluntary cooperation? A lot of people support piracy or leaked code as a means to an ends. That isn't voluntary cooperation.
TransMeta has been around long enough that silicon may be close if in fact test silicon isn't already there. Given TransMeta's reluctance to say anything at all regarding their product I'd say that if they do announce a processor on November 15th they'll also announce a relatively short time till actual delivery.
You don't need a fab to build a microprocessor. Many CPU's are built using third party fabrication resources such as the MIPS microprocessor.
In other articles (sorry, no references right now) it mentioned that the danger was that consumers could be tricked into accepting electronic documents because the acceptance could be buried in a contract the same way other things are buried in the fine print. In other words the bill was two parts 1) digital signatures are valid 2) digital contracts and amendmants from companies are valid.
The original alternative only covered 1) digital signatures are valid but was squashed mightily. A democratic provision 3) any agreement that the consumer will accept digital documents must be highly visible and seperate was also killed.
Firewire board: ADS technologies - 90.00
DV Camera: Sony TRV 310 - 750.00
Not cheap, but not out of line either, especially for the video camera. A Sony Hi8 is around 500 bucks. A cheap analog capture board can probably be had for 100 bucks or so.
Firewire drives are expensive but all the ones I've seen are geared to laptop users (fits in a pocket and no external power). You're paying a premium for features you don't need on a desktop or server.
Obviously keyboards and mice wouldn't normally benefit from a faster interface (Ooh, I can type at up to 500 words per minute now!!!) but there is a benefit to the motherboard itself though. A computer is roughly divided into two busses and everything else hangs off of these busses. The front side bus is where you hang memory off of and is a high speed bus with very tightly controlled electrical characterisics.
The peripheral bus is typically a PCI bus. Every other bus you see advertised is actually a chip which hangs off of this bus. More things hanging off means more capacitance as well as more electrical power. So parallel ports, serial ports, keyboard ports and mouse ports all have a cost associated with them. More capacitance means its more expensive to design a board that transmits signals at a given data rate. These chips also consume board real estate.
So by building a 21st century motherboard that has less devices hanging off of the PCI bus would be a good thing. The USB port is responsible for more general purpose signalling at up to 12 mb/s: keyboards, mice, graphics tablets and maybe a floppy. The firewire port is better for high bandwidth applications without requiring a dedicated PCI card: video cameras, some forms of storage. A hard drive interface probably won't be going away any time soon as their bandwidth usage can be greater than FireWire.
The FDD interface is unfortunately useful on Windows. I found out how useful when Windows decided it didn't like to operate this weekend. Since I didn't have a Windows Setup floppy I was forced reinstall. There may have been a way around it but since the only thing I use Windows for is occasionaly upgrading firmware I didn't lose anything except time.
Microsoft didn't directly hold a gun to consumers heads and say 'buy this'. What they did do was hold a gun to software developers heads and occasionaly pulled the trigger. In the case of Netscape they virtually crushed their business model by coming up with a competing product and releasing it at no cost. At the same time they offered rather lucrative insentives to ISPs and web services to provide links to Internet Explorer rather than Netscape. They've done the same things for online content serving as well by offering the serving technology for free. The problem is that once they've got sufficient market share to perpetuate the free ride goes away. They've used their dominance in software, not operating systems, to squash any competitors. You want to guarantee that a competing operating system never is more than a niche player? Refuse to port Microsoft Office for it. That cuts out about 90% of your possible market penetration. They've used these tactics to keep Apple at a market share level they're comfortable with.
With Internet Explorer quickly becoming the dominant browser it will be easy for them to integrate IE only features which will preclude other browsers from accessing services. Since they won't ever port their browser to say Linux that would be one more nail in the coffin on the desktop.
Contrast this to open source software. Suppose that the DOJ imposes restrictions on Microsoft such that Linux does become dominant. Linux can't exert the same coersion on the market because by design Linux and most of the software it runs is free. Be is free to take the hypothetical butt-kicking office application and port it to their operating system, so is Apple, so is Sun and so is any other company.
I can't think of anything ethical about war, though I will concede that war is sometimes required. I always feel a bit queasy when the military or politicians mention ethics though:
Targeting civilians is ethical, we're at war with the entire country not just the military or its leaders, besides they are probably aiding the war effort.
Targeting a specific person, say the resident dictator in charge is unethical. Heaven forbid this causes an assasination attempt against one of our leaders. Better to do a bombing run against a city and worry about terrorist acts.
Embargos are ok even though they almost exclusively impact civilians. Few of the upper caste ever go hungry despite very restrictive embargos.
Looking at ethics from my narrow viewpoint any hacking attempts that the military is capable of would be unethical. All they should be able to do is harm civilian companies since any important military operations should not be directly connected. Destabilizing the economy would harm civilians long before it'd harm the military.
I've got the A/V Producer 8 by UIEC and it controls everything... except for my Carver tuner. Apparently Carver uses a higher frequency for its I/R port which universal remotes don't use.
What it does control it controls admirably though.
I'd buy a Palm Pilot if I knew that it would be able to control my Carver CT-26v.
I think everybody saw this coming, it shouldn't be a suprise at all. I'm not sure what the outcome will be. The danger is that the content scrambling system for DVD was leaked. Anything derived from that is contaminated so the efforts to rewrite it were useless. The only way to create a legal implementation of something is via either reverse engineering or cleanroom techniques (or licensing, but that was out of the question in this case). This may mean that there can never be a GPL'd DVD decoder, the onus would be on the license holder to prove that they never saw the leaked technology. This may be difficult.
What some smart vendor should do at this point is create a Linux DVD driver, the time is probably right to make a lot of money (selling the only Linux compatible DVD solution) with a minimal effort.