The plans for building said bridge are, however. Let's stop calling this speech, as it's confusing. I prefer the prase freedom of expression, rather than freedom of speech, since it's more applicable. The plans for the bridge (the design) is most certainly expression.
If you make an exact copy of a DVD with CSS encryption, the person that gets that copy can't copy it without DeCSS, if you make a DVD after using DeCSS, then the person that gets that can make as many copies as they want, without using DeCSS.
The product they produce with DeCSS is much easier to distribute. Do you even know what DeCSS is? DeCSS can't be used to copy a DVD. Period. And an CSS protected DVD is just as easy to view as a non-CSS proteccted DVD. Open DVD tray, place DVD on tray, close tray. Any commercial DVD player will play the DVD as if it was the original. The only thing that DeCSS does is to allow one to play a DVD on a non-MPAA-blessed DVD player. It has nothing to do with copying DVDs. Period.
The MPAA's lawyer states that the DMCA does not constitute a permenant copyright, since the encryption *may* be broken at another time?
1) This assumes that the publisher of such material doesn't use sufficient protection, and worse...
2) It assumes that the publisher is not using the same method of protection (CSS in this case) over any period of time. Consider 2 movies, one produced in say the 1940's, and one produced in 2000. So if I purchase Casablanca and The Matrix on DVD, is it OK for me to distribute DeCSS when the copyright expires on Casablanca, or do I have to wait another 50-odd years since The Matrix DVD uses the same protection method. What If they're still using CSS 50 years from now? Or 100 years?
I trashed my filesystem but good using this. Essentially, -k1 (the default is -k0) will keep your hdparm settings, should the IDE controller issue a reset for some reason. Why would it do this? Under normal opperation I don't know, but I did manage to hand hdparm a -Xnn that my hardware did not like. Since the controller didn't like what I had done, it tried to issue a reset, to undo my mistake (the bad -Xnn). Unfortunately, I had also issued a -k1, which forced the bad -Xnn setting to be restored, which pissed off the controller, which reset, which.... well, it was a big ugly loop. By the time I stopped it, it had pretty much hosed my filesystem.
Bottom line: make sure your hdparm settings work before issuing the -k1!
Cost of the os is really infinitesimal to the actual systems design though don't ya think? which brings me to...
Not when you are rolling out tens of thousands of your devices. And the smaller/cheaper the device, the more the cost of the OS licence impacts the sale price. When you're trying to sell your devices for less than a few hundred bucks, the OS licensing will have a serious impact.
And having the source code is quite valuable. I've spent enough time in embedded systems design to know that bugs in some of the well known embedded OSes are not as uncommon as one might think.
We're talking about specialists though.
No, we're talking about the embedded RT OS, not the applications running on that OS. These are two very different things. Your Embedded RT microwave applicataion would run on an Embedded RT OS. The developer of the OS wouldn't need to know jack about the application. Do you think the makers of VxWorks (WindRiver) know about microwave circuit design? Or cell phone applications? Or satellite propulsion systems? No. And they don't have to. And VxWorks is used in all of those. Those people know Embedded RT OS design. And that's all you need to know to design an Embedded RT OS. Unless, of course, you are developing an OS *specificly* for microwave applications. But this thread is clearly talking about general-purpose RT embedded OSes.
Personally, no matter how good of a kernel programmer Alan Cox is, I don't want him poking around in my microwaves chips design, because he doesn't know the system. See my point there?
But he doesn't *have* to know microwave chip design. The microwave code is just an application that would run on an embedded, real-time OS, whether it be Linux, or VxWorks, or whatever. The folks who know microwave chip design would write their application to run on the OS.
We're not talking about opening up the code for the microwave chip *application*, just the Embedded OS it runs upon. The Alan Coxes of the world wouldn't be writing the application code, just the real-time OS. And quite frankly, I am reasonably cetrain that he and the rest of the kernel developers could create a much better real-time embedded OS that most of the current close-source alternatives.
Essentially, the constitution grants* protections that the citizens have from the government. The private school can expell them, if they so choose. However, the school can't have them thrown in jail** for it. Really, it's their (the students) choice to be in that school (it's private). Technically, they don't have to serve out their punishments, from the school. They only do so by their own will, to remain in the school. Public schools couldn't get away with such nonsense, as they are part of the govenment (more or less).
* Actually, the constitution doesn't grant rights. It really acknowledges basic human rights and states that the government has no authority to trample them. Occationally happens, though.
** Provided this isn't something along the lines of a death threat, which is not protected. Anywhere.
Signals and Systems, Digital Signal Processing,
digital Control Systems, Analog Control Systems,
Linear Circuit Analysis, and Electrical Science
are all courses that...
1) CompSci and Math students rarely take
2) CompEng students will take
3) Are basicly math courses, as anyone who has taken them will tell you.
That said, at least at Clarkson (where I went),
Both CompSci and CompE students took basicly the
same math courses (math in the strict sense), but
it was the courses like Compiler Construction (for CS) and Digital Signal Processing (for CompE)
that seperated the two.
CS is more "discrete and combinatorial" math, while CE is is more "nasty page-long calculus problem" math.
The "only open source can be trusted" argument only holds up if everyone looks at all the source, which rarely happens except in the luckiest projects.
Absolutely false.
If even ONE person who is not directly involved in the project looks at the source, we ALL benefit.
Case in point: proftpd. Look at their mailing list sometime. People are constantly checking the diffs from new versions for new bugs that may be introduced. Rouge code would be found and squashed in a heartbeat. I may not look at the code, you may not look at the code, but there are plenty of people who do. This may not be true for all those "version 0.01a" freshmeat announcements, but any mature, sizable project (like, say, vulnerability scanners) it tends to hold very true.
That's quite untrue, actually. Sounds like someone with stock in a particular distro company may have told you that.;-)
Under all but rare or weird circumstances upgrading to a newer kernel will only break a program if it relies on a special module or patched code in the kernel that the distro makeer has pre-applied to the kernel and that is not standard with stock kernel downloads. These kinds of programs are few and far between.
No, it's a legitimate concern. Back in the 2.0 -> 2.2 conversion, some essential programs (most notealbly dhcpcd) broke under the new kernel. If you upgraded, and had not known about it, you'd be SOL, as you wouldn't be able to connect to the internet to read about how to fix your problem, because your DHCP client wouldn't work. Catch-22.
No. He's right. Last Novenber, or so, Linus said
he was hoping it would be out some time in December (1999). Do a little research before slinging insults.
I assume the algorithm is something along the lines of "don't move this package until all dependancies can move with it".
Remember: it's moving "unbroken" packages, and a package with unmet dependencies is broken by definition.
There is not a single good reason from a software engineering point of view for NVIDIA to open source their drivers.
Sure there is. Mabye not for nVidia, but for me. What happens when nVidia decides to stop supporting the TNT2 on Linux?
Really. Go to the nVidia site. See how much support there is if you own a Geforce? What about the TNT/TNT2? Big difference, isn't there? It wasn't always like this. At one point (last year), there was as much TNT/TNT2 support as there is for the Geforce now. Eventually, (probably a year or two) there will be next to nothing for the TNT/TNT2. If the drivers were open sourced, it would make no difference. The XF86 folks would maintain the driver, update it for newer kernels/XF86, and we (the owners of the TNT/TNT2 cards) would have little to worry about.
As it stands though, there's an axe over our heads. It's not a question of "will support for this card disappear", but rather "when will support for this card disappear".
So yes, you're right; the typical user isn't going to be mucking with the code anytime soon. But you're way off base assuming that that means open sourcing the drivers has no effect on them.
The day nVidia drops Linux support for my card, I am SOL.
Since the general concensis is that this company is a fraud, can anyone actually suggest a *specific* *model* that supports:
DTS
Dolby Digital AC3
Progressive Scan output
Component video output
Unlimited Region SELECTABLE (not region 0)
DVD-R
Macrovision toggle
Quite frankly, I could give a rat's ass if it can play mp3 cd's, or even audio CD's (I have a good cd player, thanks.
But with health insurance (as with a child care option) you would have a choice. If you do not want health care ou do not take it. You are still in essence helping to subsidize it for other employees.
how so? If you opt out of health insurance, not only do you not pay the premium, but your employer also adds back what they would have subsidized to your paycheck.
For example (and I am pulling numbers out of the air here, I forget what they actually are):
If I normally pay $25 a month for health care, and my employer would normally pay $175 a month, but I opt out, not only would I receive the $25 I don't have to pay, but I would have an additional $125 a month.
I wouldn't say this makes Linux more vulnerable to hardware failure. Quite the opposite, really. It means that Linux detected a problem with corrupted memory, caught the problem, and handled the error gracefully. Much cleaner than a BSOD or random flakyness.
There's really no way for software to "fix" a hardware problem. If it's broken, it's broken.
Now, if Linux jus kept on going, pretending nothing was wrong, working with corrupted memory, and randomly crashing, *that* would be vulnerability to hardware failure.
It's not necessarily being wrapped up in linux superiority, (though it does come off that way).
It's been my experience that sales material (which is what his boss gave him) is horrendously inaccurate.
And I'm not just saying "one system may be tweeked while the otehr isn't", I'm talking *huge* discrepencies between marketing literature and reality. Sometimes numbers will be off by orders of magnitude.
He's right not to trust marketing literature, and to seek independent statistics. In fact, I'd say it's part of his job. It's clear from his question that he is biased. So is Dell. And for all the faults of the Slashdot crowd (they are biased as well), I am fairly certain that if W2K/IIS really is an order of magnitude faster than Linux/Apache, as Dell says, that fact will be evident, either in the form of posts giving results that say it's true, or lack of posts that say it isn't.
KDE has always been GPL. The idea that there could be
source-to-source conflict between KDE and GPL code sounds to me to
turn on legal subtleties that I doubt RMS, pace his status as
co-author of the GPL, is at all qualified to judge.
True, KDE has always been GPL'd. However, the GPL states quite clearly that you can't distribute binaries of GPL'd software linked against non-GPL'd libraries. Since KDE was linked to QT, which was *not* GPL'd, it was illegal to distribute KDE binaries.
RMS did that on purpose. He wanted to make sure that a completely free (in GPL'd terms) system existed. By adding the linking-against-non-GPL'd libraries requirement was in the GPL, he was trying to ensure that there was *no* dependency on non-free software.
Honestly, why is this so difficult for some people to grasp?
By "Merged", I don't think he meant actually making the two projects into one.
Some types of merging could be:
1) Writing apps that supported GNOME *and* KDE.
2) Drag 'n Drop support between KDE and GNOME apps.
In other words, you would still have two seperate desktop environments, but each could support features of the other.
Slashdot Mirror
The plans for building said bridge are, however. Let's stop calling this speech, as it's confusing. I prefer the prase freedom of expression, rather than freedom of speech, since it's more applicable. The plans for the bridge (the design) is most certainly expression.
If you make an exact copy of a DVD with CSS encryption, the person that gets that copy can't copy it without DeCSS, if you make a DVD after using DeCSS, then the person that gets that can make as many copies as they want, without using DeCSS.
The product they produce with DeCSS is much easier to distribute.
Do you even know what DeCSS is? DeCSS can't be used to copy a DVD. Period. And an CSS protected DVD is just as easy to view as a non-CSS proteccted DVD. Open DVD tray, place DVD on tray, close tray. Any commercial DVD player will play the DVD as if it was the original. The only thing that DeCSS does is to allow one to play a DVD on a non-MPAA-blessed DVD player. It has nothing to do with copying DVDs. Period.
The MPAA's lawyer states that the DMCA does not constitute a permenant copyright, since the encryption *may* be broken at another time?
1) This assumes that the publisher of such material doesn't use sufficient protection, and worse...
2) It assumes that the publisher is not using the same method of protection (CSS in this case) over any period of time. Consider 2 movies, one produced in say the 1940's, and one produced in 2000. So if I purchase Casablanca and The Matrix on DVD, is it OK for me to distribute DeCSS when the copyright expires on Casablanca, or do I have to wait another 50-odd years since The Matrix DVD uses the same protection method. What If they're still using CSS 50 years from now? Or 100 years?
I trashed my filesystem but good using this. Essentially, -k1 (the default is -k0) will keep your hdparm settings, should the IDE controller issue a reset for some reason. Why would it do this? Under normal opperation I don't know, but I did manage to hand hdparm a -Xnn that my hardware did not like. Since the controller didn't like what I had done, it tried to issue a reset, to undo my mistake (the bad -Xnn). Unfortunately, I had also issued a -k1, which forced the bad -Xnn setting to be restored, which pissed off the controller, which reset, which.... well, it was a big ugly loop. By the time I stopped it, it had pretty much hosed my filesystem.
Bottom line: make sure your hdparm settings work before issuing the -k1!
Cost of the os is really infinitesimal to the actual systems design though don't ya think? which brings me to...
Not when you are rolling out tens of thousands of your devices. And the smaller/cheaper the device, the more the cost of the OS licence impacts the sale price. When you're trying to sell your devices for less than a few hundred bucks, the OS licensing will have a serious impact.
And having the source code is quite valuable. I've spent enough time in embedded systems design to know that bugs in some of the well known embedded OSes are not as uncommon as one might think.
We're talking about specialists though.
No, we're talking about the embedded RT OS, not the applications running on that OS. These are two very different things. Your Embedded RT microwave applicataion would run on an Embedded RT OS. The developer of the OS wouldn't need to know jack about the application. Do you think the makers of VxWorks (WindRiver) know about microwave circuit design? Or cell phone applications? Or satellite propulsion systems? No. And they don't have to. And VxWorks is used in all of those. Those people know Embedded RT OS design. And that's all you need to know to design an Embedded RT OS. Unless, of course, you are developing an OS *specificly* for microwave applications. But this thread is clearly talking about general-purpose RT embedded OSes.
Personally, no matter how good of a kernel programmer Alan Cox is, I don't want him poking around in my microwaves chips design, because he doesn't know the system. See my point there?
But he doesn't *have* to know microwave chip design. The microwave code is just an application that would run on an embedded, real-time OS, whether it be Linux, or VxWorks, or whatever. The folks who know microwave chip design would write their application to run on the OS.
We're not talking about opening up the code for the microwave chip *application*, just the Embedded OS it runs upon. The Alan Coxes of the world wouldn't be writing the application code, just the real-time OS. And quite frankly, I am reasonably cetrain that he and the rest of the kernel developers could create a much better real-time embedded OS that most of the current close-source alternatives.
Essentially, the constitution grants* protections that the citizens have from the government. The private school can expell them, if they so choose. However, the school can't have them thrown in jail** for it. Really, it's their (the students) choice to be in that school (it's private). Technically, they don't have to serve out their punishments, from the school. They only do so by their own will, to remain in the school. Public schools couldn't get away with such nonsense, as they are part of the govenment (more or less).
* Actually, the constitution doesn't grant rights. It really acknowledges basic human rights and states that the government has no authority to trample them. Occationally happens, though.
** Provided this isn't something along the lines of a death threat, which is not protected. Anywhere.
Signals and Systems, Digital Signal Processing,
digital Control Systems, Analog Control Systems,
Linear Circuit Analysis, and Electrical Science
are all courses that...
1) CompSci and Math students rarely take
2) CompEng students will take
3) Are basicly math courses, as anyone who has taken them will tell you.
That said, at least at Clarkson (where I went),
Both CompSci and CompE students took basicly the
same math courses (math in the strict sense), but
it was the courses like Compiler Construction (for CS) and Digital Signal Processing (for CompE)
that seperated the two.
CS is more "discrete and combinatorial" math, while CE is is more "nasty page-long calculus problem" math.
Just my $0.02
Since CompE and CompSci are so closely related,
course-wise, you might consider going CompE, and
loading up on CompSci courses for your electives.
Ive always wondered that. How does one force linking against libc.so.6 insteadof glibc-2.x.x? Thanks
Not true. There was more to it that a recompile.
You also needed a new version of dhcpcd ( >= 1.13.x, If memory serves).
The "only open source can be trusted" argument only holds up if everyone looks at all the source, which rarely happens except in the luckiest projects.
Absolutely false.
If even ONE person who is not directly involved in the project looks at the source, we ALL benefit.
Case in point: proftpd. Look at their mailing list sometime. People are constantly checking the diffs from new versions for new bugs that may be introduced. Rouge code would be found and squashed in a heartbeat. I may not look at the code, you may not look at the code, but there are plenty of people who do. This may not be true for all those "version 0.01a" freshmeat announcements, but any mature, sizable project (like, say, vulnerability scanners) it tends to hold very true.
That's quite untrue, actually. Sounds like someone with stock in a particular distro company may have told you that. ;-)
Under all but rare or weird circumstances upgrading to a newer kernel will only break a program if it relies on a special module or patched code in the kernel that the distro makeer has pre-applied to the kernel and that is not standard with stock kernel downloads. These kinds of programs are few and far between.
No, it's a legitimate concern. Back in the 2.0 -> 2.2 conversion, some essential programs (most notealbly dhcpcd) broke under the new kernel. If you upgraded, and had not known about it, you'd be SOL, as you wouldn't be able to connect to the internet to read about how to fix your problem, because your DHCP client wouldn't work. Catch-22.
A hyperlink is nothing like a quote. It can be a reference to a quote, though.
A hyperlink is essentially just a pointer to more information. It merely tells where something resides. And that is NOT copywriteable information.
No. He's right. Last Novenber, or so, Linus said
he was hoping it would be out some time in December (1999). Do a little research before slinging insults.
I needed a good laugh!
I assume the algorithm is something along the lines of "don't move this package until all dependancies can move with it".
Remember: it's moving "unbroken" packages, and a package with unmet dependencies is broken by definition.
There is not a single good reason from a software engineering point of view for NVIDIA to open source their drivers.
Sure there is. Mabye not for nVidia, but for me. What happens when nVidia decides to stop supporting the TNT2 on Linux?
Really. Go to the nVidia site. See how much support there is if you own a Geforce? What about the TNT/TNT2? Big difference, isn't there? It wasn't always like this. At one point (last year), there was as much TNT/TNT2 support as there is for the Geforce now. Eventually, (probably a year or two) there will be next to nothing for the TNT/TNT2. If the drivers were open sourced, it would make no difference. The XF86 folks would maintain the driver, update it for newer kernels/XF86, and we (the owners of the TNT/TNT2 cards) would have little to worry about.
As it stands though, there's an axe over our heads. It's not a question of "will support for this card disappear", but rather "when will support for this card disappear".
So yes, you're right; the typical user isn't going to be mucking with the code anytime soon. But you're way off base assuming that that means open sourcing the drivers has no effect on them.
The day nVidia drops Linux support for my card, I am SOL.
Since the general concensis is that this company is a fraud, can anyone actually suggest a *specific* *model* that supports:
DTS
Dolby Digital AC3
Progressive Scan output
Component video output
Unlimited Region SELECTABLE (not region 0)
DVD-R
Macrovision toggle
Quite frankly, I could give a rat's ass if it can play mp3 cd's, or even audio CD's (I have a good cd player, thanks.
Any suggestions?
But with health insurance (as with a child care option) you would have a choice. If you do not want health care ou do not take it. You are still in essence helping to subsidize it for other employees.
how so? If you opt out of health insurance, not only do you not pay the premium, but your employer also adds back what they would have subsidized to your paycheck.
For example (and I am pulling numbers out of the air here, I forget what they actually are):
If I normally pay $25 a month for health care, and my employer would normally pay $175 a month, but I opt out, not only would I receive the $25 I don't have to pay, but I would have an additional $125 a month.
I wouldn't say this makes Linux more vulnerable to hardware failure. Quite the opposite, really. It means that Linux detected a problem with corrupted memory, caught the problem, and handled the error gracefully. Much cleaner than a BSOD or random flakyness.
There's really no way for software to "fix" a hardware problem. If it's broken, it's broken.
Now, if Linux jus kept on going, pretending nothing was wrong, working with corrupted memory, and randomly crashing, *that* would be vulnerability to hardware failure.
It's not necessarily being wrapped up in linux superiority, (though it does come off that way).
It's been my experience that sales material (which is what his boss gave him) is horrendously inaccurate.
And I'm not just saying "one system may be tweeked while the otehr isn't", I'm talking *huge* discrepencies between marketing literature and reality. Sometimes numbers will be off by orders of magnitude.
He's right not to trust marketing literature, and to seek independent statistics. In fact, I'd say it's part of his job. It's clear from his question that he is biased. So is Dell. And for all the faults of the Slashdot crowd (they are biased as well), I am fairly certain that if W2K/IIS really is an order of magnitude faster than Linux/Apache, as Dell says, that fact will be evident, either in the form of posts giving results that say it's true, or lack of posts that say it isn't.
Right, but then You were the one that infringed on the copyright, not mp3.com.
KDE has always been GPL. The idea that there could be
source-to-source conflict between KDE and GPL code sounds to me to
turn on legal subtleties that I doubt RMS, pace his status as
co-author of the GPL, is at all qualified to judge.
True, KDE has always been GPL'd. However, the GPL states quite clearly that you can't distribute binaries of GPL'd software linked against non-GPL'd libraries. Since KDE was linked to QT, which was *not* GPL'd, it was illegal to distribute KDE binaries.
RMS did that on purpose. He wanted to make sure that a completely free (in GPL'd terms) system existed. By adding the linking-against-non-GPL'd libraries requirement was in the GPL, he was trying to ensure that there was *no* dependency on non-free software.
Honestly, why is this so difficult for some people to grasp?
By "Merged", I don't think he meant actually making the two projects into one.
Some types of merging could be:
1) Writing apps that supported GNOME *and* KDE.
2) Drag 'n Drop support between KDE and GNOME apps.
In other words, you would still have two seperate desktop environments, but each could support features of the other.
Quite annoying, actually.