People on the net understand that bad guys 0wn boxes and consider themselves cool. They seem to forget that bad corporations 0wn courts and do far more evil things.
There is no remotely possible way an honest judge could have reached the conclusions he/she did
The new warner region stuff is actually _good_ news to people because the disk is no longer locked by region meaning it plays in any DVD ROM drive with open source players. Saves some of that mucking about with firmware
As to region coding itself, well it violates NAFTA for a part (try moving a DVD around the NAFTA free trade zone since Mexico is not Region 1). Its all very odd - most Europeans only buy region free players 8)
The first priority for 2.4.x has to be to get it rock solid for the majority of users (and unfortunately for most definitions that means x86). Linus has also been avoiding making vast numbers of changes in one go while working on the really hard to debug and critical fixes to the core code. In the meantime I've been merging chunks of architecture code into the -ac tree ready to go as I get them.
A good solid well maintained self sufficient ppc tree is one of the reasons we can do that of course
Compiling in power management support on the test boxes I use cut the power bill by 20%. A lot of that actually seems to come from monitor powerdown rather than CPU idling, but with an Athlon drawing 60 watts of power at peak (or 240W once we all have nice quad athlon boxes) its still a substantial saving.
For most boxes the cpu halting BSD and Linux do will actually give almost as good results as the APM bios. On laptops APM bios is often measurably better as it is able to reconfigure SDRAM timings and the like in ways only practical for box specific code.
Oh he's out there somewhere, as are the people who did things like Shades. I've not seen any of the VaxMUD hackers around for a long time though. I guess being VMS fortran people they now dwell in a different universe
as so nicely and sarcastically pointed out most of the backport was most definitely not done by Red Hat. Bits of stuff/debugging were. Most of it came from the USB backport work done by Vojtech Pavlik at SuSE. The 2.2.18pre stuff is also based on that work along with other fixes. Greg KH is currently working hard to keep my mailbox filled with patches to get the USB almost fully in line with 2.4test by 2.2.18
I would tend to agree. I've had similar experiences beating some book vendors into putting the right label on their CD-ROMs in the back of books. They had boilerplate they had used for years and suddenely finding it didnt work for a project caused them a lot of chaos.
Once it percolated to the right layer the lawyers generated new boilerplate and they now slap that on anything containing other people's software.
If you are shown to have used copyrighted material of the first company then since the advertising agency failed to advise you they didnt own the code you would be sueing them in turn.
Competition will I think help. The big vendors will continue to rip off the music stores who will continue to rip off the customer in self defence.
Independants and people looking for better margins will pick up music from outside the expensive megamedia cartel. This is classic business technique. You break into a new market by selling a product to the stores at a higher margin for them but similar RRP to the competition. The stores love you, they want to sell your product more so you get better coverage. If they make more selling one of your CD's versus 5 of the cartels whose CD's will they push. If small bands start granting cheap radio play deals to radio stations who are they going to play more of.
MP3 is just one of the tools, the time is about ripe IMHO for an incomer into the industry to make an absolute killing by making consumers and bands far happier. In fact if they were smart a group of big name bands probably ought to get together to found such a label and get out from under the thumb of the cartel.
With things they own like the old network cards 3COM have been extremely good. I asked for documentation on the etherlink MC/32 and not only got documents back, but on paper. The times I've had problems with 3com docs have been when 3com dont own all the rights, when they are still filing patents on the hardware and it might cause them a problem that way.
Stuff like the TC boxes they probably don't own all the rights to. The code they use undoubtedly contains large licensed components and I can quite believe they dont _have_ good documentation except for the source to release.
Certainly when I worked for 3com rapops we had stuff inherited from Sonix that had basically -no- hardware documentation.
As vendors go 3com have been one of the most supportive to Linux, but I don't think you can expect them to do the due dilligence to release sections of code or go off and write docs for random dead junk switches. Maybe if you offer to cover their costs for the process ? Do you love the hardware enough to offer them $20K to do the work - remembering the HW may be too specialist to run any normal OS.
1. Some XFree releases have a lot of bugs in MediaGX support. Use 3.3.3.1 or 3.3.6
2. The RDTSC handling is funny. Linux will disable the TSC and handle it fine
3. The SB emulation has bugs. 2.2.15 has workarounds for both the DMA counter bug and the DMA emulation bug.
4. The PCI bridge is a bit dim. Its fine for most stuff but put a tv capture card there and you may have issues. Its not clear whose fault that is
Otherwise its a good little CPU, it has 16K cache only but with good latency and the video from main memory does hit performance. Figure P120-P150 for a MediaGX 180Mhz.
Accidentally shipping a default password is not good. A 'security' company that blasts that password around rather than saying 'there is a default password that can be cracked' is even more foolish.
As to Pirahna, it was audited. I can attest to that because I'm the guy who audited it and Im the one who missed the quoting error that let the ; thing work.
Real Lesson 1: Never write secure code in languages with unclear evaluation semantics.
Aside from the irony that the AOL listing is not for AOL itself but the dialups..
People like you who dont bother to secure themselves against spam are why the problem exists. If you had an unsafe building then you would get forced to clean it up.
ORBS exists because people don't care about open relaying. Hey its not you being spammed, its all those other folk, you can fix it later.
One of its suggested clauses is allowing distribution only where you dont need an ISSN or ISBN. This even allows small scale paper distribution to occur.
Of course you can now use UCITA and sue people who lend a copy to a friend as well as requiring that you shred it when you have finished with it and keeping the right to go into their house and take it back if you want to
Humm ? Who is going to pay their $2500 a year. Or the people who dont want to work for a Linux vendor but would like to spend their spare time fiddling with a USB camera or other widget ?
Policing by competitors isnt right. The SEC is charged with protection of US investors from fraud. You should take it up with them, as should everyone else who is concerned and has hard evidence.
Doing a dual license GPL(or LGPL or MPL) release doesnt prevent you as author from releasing the software under other licenses too, nor variants of it providing you dont incorporate other peoples patches.
If you use a BSD license your competitors can pick up your code, they can trivially enhance it and refuse to provide your with their changes. If they are feeling bored they will also file a patent claim against you so that you cannot sell your own software any more without a huge lawsuit bill while they can smile and make all the money you should have made.
The GPL has a patents with distribution rule for exactly these kind of reasons.
If your code is a module or library and you want control of the module only then the GPL/LGPL can be excessive, in which case the MPL may well strike a good ground.
If you simply want to throw code to the world and don't care who uses it for what and if they make your commercial life hard then the BSD license (epecially without the advertising clause) is pretty much perfect. Its a 'you have it you do what you like but dont sue me please' license.
Excuse 2 doesnt work as a lot of inventors can testify after going bannkrupt.
See you patent a cool idea as a small group. A big company use it so you complain. They offer to buy it from you for an insulting sum. You refuse and they refuse to license it claiming your patent is probably invalid. You sue them. They sue you back for anything they can think of including every patent vaguely related they own.
So you are forced to go bust or settle out of court. The settlement includes you paying them royalties and them not paying you a penny.
If you stay in business the big company will simply sell for less than you, and if you are annoying they will dump product below cost to remove you for good
That is the patent system. Not quite what its designers had in mind..
The wap forum can do nothing but put a brave face on their ending. The $20,000 for companies will put anyone off meaning WAP will never get the rich content the web did. Nothing appears to preclude the patent owners from charging everyone later if the so wish.
There is a lesson here for the US goverment. Had their stupid algorithm patents got out of hand before the web they'd have no internet worth talking about, just a random bunch of computer wizards, universities and military sites
Slashdot Mirror
You make an assumption that the right way to test code is in big lumps. That is somethiny any engineer will tell you is bogus.
You test continually, you test each changeset, and then every so often you run a several day shakedown test.
You are right that you can't QA a kernel to vendor production grade in two weeks. Some of the RH test runs take several days per run for example.
People on the net understand that bad guys 0wn boxes and consider themselves cool. They seem to forget that bad corporations 0wn courts and do far more evil things. There is no remotely possible way an honest judge could have reached the conclusions he/she did
The new warner region stuff is actually _good_ news to people because the disk is no longer locked by region meaning it plays in any DVD ROM drive with open source players. Saves some of that mucking about with firmware
As to region coding itself, well it violates NAFTA for a part (try moving a DVD around the NAFTA free trade zone since Mexico is not Region 1). Its all very odd - most Europeans only buy region free players 8)
The first priority for 2.4.x has to be to get it rock solid for the majority of users (and unfortunately for most definitions that means x86). Linus has also been avoiding making vast numbers of changes in one go while working on the really hard to debug and critical fixes to the core code. In the meantime I've been merging chunks of architecture code into the -ac tree ready to go as I get them.
A good solid well maintained self sufficient ppc tree is one of the reasons we can do that of course
Compiling in power management support on the test boxes I use cut the power bill by 20%. A lot of that actually seems to come from monitor powerdown rather than CPU idling, but with an Athlon drawing 60 watts of power at peak (or 240W once we all have nice quad athlon boxes) its still a substantial saving.
For most boxes the cpu halting BSD and Linux do will actually give almost as good results as the APM bios. On laptops APM bios is often measurably better as it is able to reconfigure SDRAM timings and the like in ways only practical for box specific code.
Oh he's out there somewhere, as are the people who did things like Shades. I've not seen any of the VaxMUD hackers around for a long time though. I guess being VMS fortran people they now dwell in a different universe
AMP actually had Colossal cave as part of the MUD
itself. Its a reasonably well suited map to get the game theory and competition/co-operation right
Grin..
as so nicely and sarcastically pointed out most of the backport was most definitely not done by Red Hat. Bits of stuff/debugging were. Most of it came from the USB backport work done by Vojtech Pavlik at SuSE. The 2.2.18pre stuff is also based on that work along with other fixes. Greg KH is currently working hard to keep my mailbox filled with patches to get the USB almost fully in line with 2.4test by 2.2.18
Alan
I would tend to agree. I've had similar experiences beating some book vendors into putting the right label on their CD-ROMs in the back of books. They had boilerplate they had used for years and suddenely finding it didnt work for a project caused them a lot of chaos.
Once it percolated to the right layer the lawyers generated new boilerplate and they now slap that on anything containing other people's software.
But yes they should be more careful
Alan
If you are shown to have used copyrighted material of the first company then since the advertising agency failed to advise you they didnt own the code you would be sueing them in turn.
Alan
Competition will I think help. The big vendors will continue to rip off the music stores who will continue to rip off the customer in self defence.
Independants and people looking for better margins will pick up music from outside the expensive megamedia cartel. This is classic business technique. You break into a new market by selling a product to the stores at a higher margin for them but similar RRP to the competition. The stores love you, they want to sell your product more so you get better coverage. If they make more selling one of your CD's versus 5 of the cartels whose CD's will they push. If small bands start granting cheap radio play deals to radio stations who are they going to play more of.
MP3 is just one of the tools, the time is about ripe IMHO for an incomer into the industry to make an absolute killing by making consumers and bands far happier. In fact if they were smart a group of big name bands probably ought to get together to found such a label and get out from under the thumb of the cartel.
Alan
With things they own like the old network cards 3COM have been extremely good. I asked for documentation on the etherlink MC/32 and not only got documents back, but on paper. The times I've had problems with 3com docs have been when 3com dont own all the rights, when they are still filing patents on the hardware and it might cause them a problem that way.
Stuff like the TC boxes they probably don't own all the rights to. The code they use undoubtedly contains large licensed components and I can quite believe they dont _have_ good documentation except for the source to release.
Certainly when I worked for 3com rapops we had stuff inherited from Sonix that had basically -no- hardware documentation.
As vendors go 3com have been one of the most supportive to Linux, but I don't think you can expect them to do the due dilligence to release sections of code or go off and write docs for random dead junk switches. Maybe if you offer
to cover their costs for the process ? Do you love
the hardware enough to offer them $20K to do the work - remembering the HW may be too specialist to run any normal OS.
The chip has the following problems we know about
1. Some XFree releases have a lot of bugs in MediaGX support. Use 3.3.3.1 or 3.3.6
2. The RDTSC handling is funny. Linux will disable
the TSC and handle it fine
3. The SB emulation has bugs. 2.2.15 has workarounds for both the DMA counter bug and the DMA emulation bug.
4. The PCI bridge is a bit dim. Its fine for most stuff but put a tv capture card there and you may have issues. Its not clear whose fault that is
Otherwise its a good little CPU, it has 16K cache only but with good latency and the video from main memory does hit performance. Figure P120-P150 for a MediaGX 180Mhz.
Alan
Accidentally shipping a default password is not good. A 'security' company that blasts that password around rather than saying 'there is a default password that can be cracked' is even more foolish.
As to Pirahna, it was audited. I can attest to that because I'm the guy who audited it and Im the one who missed the quoting error that let the ; thing work.
Real Lesson 1: Never write secure code in languages with unclear evaluation semantics.
Real Lesson 2: Nobody is infallible
Alan
Aside from the irony that the AOL listing is not for AOL itself but the dialups..
People like you who dont bother to secure themselves against spam are why the problem exists. If you had an unsafe building then you would get forced to clean it up.
ORBS exists because people don't care about open
relaying. Hey its not you being spammed, its all
those other folk, you can fix it later.
Not socially responsible at all.
One of its suggested clauses is allowing distribution only where you dont need an ISSN or ISBN. This even allows small scale paper distribution to occur.
Of course you can now use UCITA and sue people who lend a copy to a friend as well as requiring that you shred it when you have finished with it and keeping the right to go into their house and take it back if you want to
Alan
Humm ? Who is going to pay their $2500 a year. Or the people who dont want to work for a Linux vendor but would like to spend their spare time fiddling with a USB camera or other widget ?
Alan
The GPL does not allow him to require people give
up rights they were granted by third parties.
He seems the ideal person to go down in court and
set the precedent by losing. Especially if he
keeps to that kind of legacy theory 8)
Alan
The Glengarry highland games and music fest is just after OLS and not very far away. The timing is quite good in most peoples eyes 8)
Alan
Policing by competitors isnt right. The SEC is charged with protection of US investors from fraud. You should take it up with them, as should
everyone else who is concerned and has hard evidence.
Doing a dual license GPL(or LGPL or MPL) release doesnt prevent you as author from releasing the software under other licenses too, nor variants of it providing you dont incorporate other peoples patches.
If you use a BSD license your competitors can pick up your code, they can trivially enhance it and refuse to provide your with their changes. If they are feeling bored they will also file a patent claim against you so that you cannot sell your own software any more without a huge lawsuit bill while they can smile and make all the money you should have made.
The GPL has a patents with distribution rule for exactly these kind of reasons.
If your code is a module or library and you want control of the module only then the GPL/LGPL can be excessive, in which case the MPL may well strike a good ground.
If you simply want to throw code to the world and don't care who uses it for what and if they make your commercial life hard then the BSD license (epecially without the advertising clause) is pretty much perfect. Its a 'you have it you do what you like but dont sue me please' license.
Alan
Excuse 2 doesnt work as a lot of inventors can testify after going bannkrupt.
..
See you patent a cool idea as a small group. A big company use it so you complain. They offer to buy it from you for an insulting sum. You refuse and they refuse to license it claiming your patent is probably invalid. You sue them. They sue you back for anything they can think of including every patent vaguely related they own.
So you are forced to go bust or settle out of court. The settlement includes you paying them royalties and them not paying you a penny.
If you stay in business the big company will simply sell for less than you, and if you are annoying they will dump product below cost to remove you for good
That is the patent system. Not quite what its designers had in mind
Alan
If my memory serves me correctly then Intel repeatedly sued both AMD and Cyrix for stuff and it got into malicious prosecution countersuits.
And the Cyrix guys sad "Intel sued us five times, they never won"
The wap forum can do nothing but put a brave face on their ending. The $20,000 for companies will put anyone off meaning WAP will never get the rich content the web did. Nothing appears to preclude the patent owners from charging everyone later if the so wish.
There is a lesson here for the US goverment. Had their stupid algorithm patents got out of hand before the web they'd have no internet worth talking about, just a random bunch of computer wizards, universities and military sites
Alan
See http://www.hrrc.org/betamax.html
That covers the entire decision. The rest of the
site has a lot of related material to home recording, although not to fair use of DVD's you bought.