This certainly raises an eyebrow, but I cannot see how it provides any value to me (or the average consumer). It makes things even more mysterious! Given a choice between something that is well known, with a published clock rate, or a 'second tier brand' that hides information, I'd think it would give Intel and even BIGGER advantage. Unless, of course, for some stupid reason, Intel decides to do the same thing.
But really, for the AMD fan, this is an insult. Hopefully their marketing and PR people know some sort of angle to this beyond the obvious that will magically capture market share by removing its Mhz rating.
Well, they're looking to fill the market that TiVo is refusing to touch... that is, the transfer of programs between TiVo units. And if it is able to transfer video, you can almost bet that it has an ethernet connector, and doesn't just do it over dialup. Good for them. Competition is going to make the PVR market better.
Regarding the 320 hours, that's going to be in low quality. I'm assuming that the ReplayTV has a two-drive limit. Either they are banking on future technology (2 x 128gb drives) or some additional compression, or both. (Additional compression is still possible, using existing methods. Anyone remember the TiVo bug where vertical resolution was lost, but was only noticable on SVideo units?)
In any case, I'm glad they're taking a stand on the sharing issue. That alone might be enough to make me switch.
Well, we've got one group wanting us to bring everything down to a level of a child so that it is safe for children. Then, we've got another group wanting us to bring everything down to 56k so it is safe for narrowband users. And you've got vision impaired users wanting to rid the net of graphics.
And I'm sure there are all sorts of other fringe groups wanting to protest this and that because of their own personal problems.
Anyone remember the South Park Christmas Play were anything offensive was removed? I'm glad the net won't have to give into everyone's demands.
The AC, unfortunately, has broadband envy. Give him a T1 connection, and you'll see his protest wither away.
BTW... do you know how hard it was going from a cable modem to a 33.6 dialup a few years ago? The pain was incredible. And I certainly wasn't blaming all the high speed users for it.
A very STRONG tip: if you are the respondant in a domain dispute, the other party gets to select which agency handles the dispute. Your only chance in counter-rigging the decision ahead of time is to pay (at a 50% discount) for a 3 member panel to hear the case. If they already paid for a 3 member panel, they've done you a service.
As a bonus, with a three party panel, YOU get to select one of the members! Further, the numbers show a STRONG statistical coorelation between 3 member panels (where the defendant makes an argument) and 1 member panels (where the defendant makes an argument) that are less leaned towards the party bringing the complaint.
Note of interest: when the party bringing the complaint paid for a 3 person panel, the three person panel also ruled in favor of the complaintant less often than on a 1 person panel.
Also interesting were the numbers at one of the arbitration agencies that (not the words of the researchers) pointed out a number of 'hanging judges'. And guess what? These hanging judges were assigned a disproportionate amount of the caseload.
What does this all say? Peer review. You're less likely to have a rogue judge if his actions are reviewed by other judges. And yes, they have pointed out rouge judges which have completely ignored the rules of arbitration.
Peer review is good for code, and it is good for arbitration.
These are some halfway decent ways of tracking what is going on with the root shell. Mind you, they aren't hackproof, but they make decent information for after-the-fact investigation:
Of course, enable your shell history. Also, turn on "lastcomm" so you can at least get the commands (but not the arguments) given at the shell prompt. Finally, more advanced versions of UNIX (I personally know HP/UX and Solaris do this) allow you to turn on snooping to system calls so you can log to disk all the nice commands and their arguments, like fork, accept, all types of disk access, etc.
Solaris has this included in something called "bsm" (basic security module) which comes with the OS. HP/UX you have to put into "trusted" mode and enable it through SAM. The logs it creates are very difficult to make an authentic looking fake for. Possible, though. Yes, syslogging to a remote host is a good idea.
Of course, a nice hacker would simply flood the syslogd that is keeping the logs... but you've got to decide how far you're going to go with all of this.
Also, there are some tools, like Sun's Configuration Service Tracker, which regularly scans the system and logs configuration changes.
Maybe there is a better way of doing all of this. But the layered approach seems to catch a lot of different things at a lot of different levels. All depending on how far you want to dig down into things.
GNG = Ghosts 'N Goblins. A delightful arcade game where you play a knight and you go around shooting and avoiding things, much like every other video game of its time.
I really think that just saying "GNU" itself isn't enough. I mean, Stallman has been the major contributor to GNU stuff. The name of GNU should be adjusted accordingly to represent that.
From now on, we should refer to this as Stallman/GNU in order to respect his view that the major contributor to a project should have its name in the title.
And, by supposition, he can then request the name "Stallman/GNU/Linux" for the Linux operating system. Its only fair.
If they would allow me to view movies in the timeframe that they are in the theater, or just before DVD rentals, this would provide value to me. Charge me as much as a seat in a movie theater, but keep the revenue all to yourself.
But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.
The movie industry is stuck in the same paradigm. They want to figure out where internet technology can be used to ADD to their current offerings. (Purely chasing up the revenue tree.) What they should be doing is asking, "What do our customers want?" But, there is that paradigm again. We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.
After reporting somewhere in the order of 10 bugs on the Slash 2.2 code, I really wish that you hadn't of gone live with this version. Mind you, a lot of bugs have been addressed, but there are quite a number still lurking out there. For example, I see that on the right some of the slash boxes don't have a grey background... they are white! And the journal area still looks a bit messed up.
Okay. As of this writing, it looks a bit better. But look at the icons in my journal entries. They are all broken. At least it is letting me post journal entries once again.
I also didn't expect that everything I did on Banjo would make it into production. I've got a lot of trash in my journal.
BTW, going to "Preferences" as AC was interesting. Talk about a Karma Whore. That UID has Karma through the roof.
But Commander, why didn't you all hold off a bit more before going live with the new version?
Just for the Fun of It
on
Linux Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Wow. Somewhat of an interesting story for me. I just got through with a long car trip with the audio book of Linus' "Just For the Fun of It" to keep my brain occupied during the mind-numbing journey.
It talked a lot about Linus himself, how Linux started, his views on Open Source, politics and the meaning of life. (His take on the meaning of life was not insightful, but at least interesting.)
Did you know that Linux started out as an overgrown terminal emulation program to read USENET newsgroups from the University's computer, and ran under Minix?
Neat stuff. Linus was taken completely by surprise that Linux has gotten to where it is today. On one hand, had he known of all the work that was ahead of him, and that he'd be spending ten years of his life on it, he would have given up. But on the other hand, seeing all that it has done and the benefits that it has brought, he said he probably would have went forward with it.
If this sounds schizophrenic, at least according to the book, that partially describes a number of Linus' views. Like on intellectual property.
Anyhow, glad to read there will be a Linux anniversary celebration, and for an intersting commute, pick up the audio book. Five CD's full.
Whew. I've spent too much time on this. Over the past few hours, I have recorded at least 10 bugs in the new code. Some of it is minor display stuff. Others deal with serious things like the complete mistreatment of A HREF and/A.
The area of the new Slash code with the greatest number of bugs in the Journals. But that is a completely new feature, so I won't entirely bitch.
And someone just hosed the page numbering code so where you've got pages 0 and 1 on an article (which don't link to the next page). You have to manually modify the "startat" in the URL to get to page #2.
I wouldn't say that it was ready for a public beta. If the Slash people thought it was, they need a team of good testers to poke holes in this stuff. Lotsa flaws.
Oh... BTW, things like TROLLTALK and all are gone! But oddly enough, you can still create your own personal SID forum, with a Slash generated number, by using one of the special pages.
The URL given (at least at this time of writing) is http://content.techweb.com/voices/harrow/harrow.ht ml which, at least as of this date, is talking about USB. And will probably be talking about something completely different, come the end of August, when this story is set to be published.
This early advance warning about this article being in the system was provided courtesy of Banjo!
I don't think my last post did an elegant job on it. We all know that the code that allows you to bypass the Macrovision CD copy protection is a DMCA violation. That should be obvious.
But isn't it just as much of a violation to bypass the Macrovision copy protection via sampling an audio stream, or recording the analog stream to another device?
By doing so, you are bypassing their mechanism to prevent the CD from being copied. And nothing in the DMCA says that it has to be 100% effective against all means of copying.
So does that make analog copying a violation because you are bypassing the digital protection?
Doesn't that make an audio CD player a device for copyright protection circumvention? If it won't play in a computer CDROM when reading the raw data, it would seem that using an audio cd player to make a copy is circumventing the copy protection!
http://www.hackhu.com is gone. Actually, even their goodbye message is gone now. They said they were folding because of the threat of DirecTV hounding them into the ground. It was *the* source for great information on the DirecTV war.
I can see DirecTV 'going through the motions' trying to scare subscribers. I can also see them actually prosecuting a handful of little people just to put up a good front. But I really don't see them nailing the end user. Just scaring the bejezus out of most of them into, 'Gee. Should I subscribe to this site that has the latest emulator code? DirecTV might get my subscription information and go after me!'
We start in the cubicle and have them talk about their current and past job. The kind of things they did. The kinds of machines they worked with. The kind of environment it is.
Then, we go into the technical questions. Things they should be able to explain. Like when you use 'uptime' (or 'w'), what do the three numbers after 'load average' represent? Here. Run a command on this box and tell me how many processors it has, what speed, and how much memory. I run 'top' on a busy production box and have them describe what they see. That kind of thing.
Also, I give them a tour of the datacenter and, while we're in there, have them identify some simple things like cards. Or I'll poing to a Sun E4000 and ask them to tell me, in general terms, about the E4000 server and what it is capable of. I might ask what the difference between the E4000 and E4500 is.
Yes, I also see how they respond to questions they don't know the answer to. But a lot of what I look for is personality. How well they're going to get along with the group and others.
...or at least, a recent survey that was strikingly similar to this if it wasn't the same one [an advertiser at AVS Forum], it was an online survey with checkboxes. (And they were a little confusing at times.) A rate of anything around 10% or below should be ignored.
PVRs are great. I just hope the media doesn't become paranoid over them and somehow manage to ruin a good thing. Besides, I (like they asked on the survey) actually will stop FF'ing to view commercials that look entertaining or interest me. I keep on gliding past for Tampax and the rest.
Something like this was discussed in the AVS TiVo Forum not to long ago. The idea was that you could have your normal TiVo set of disk(s), and then you could have a second instance of TiVo that you use for programs you want to store long term.
Using patters of light to indicate intelligence?
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 3
Wow. It's been in front of us all along, and we haven't seen it. They ARE communicating with us via regular flashes of light. And it takes a very advanced level of technology to create.
I think out of all the following:
Microsoft Legal, Microsoft Applications, Microsoft Hardware, Microsoft Marketing, Microsoft Operating system
The two I'd be most afraid of are: Microsoft Legal and Microsoft Marketing.
They are the only two departments in Microsoft that have enough chutzpah to kill their own parents, and then beg for mercy because they have recently become orphans.
It doesn't take an Einstein to say that some parts of a cable or DSL network are going to be slower due to conjestion. But you might try www.dslreports.com to get a feel for what your local cable and xDSL connectivity is like.
I certainly can't complain. I consistantly measure at 2-3Mbps on my download stream. I've never seen it go below 1Mpbs that was due to anything but the remote site being slow/jammed.
Of course, with a 56k modem, you don't have to worry too much about local (or remote) traffic conditions. You're too slow to stress anyone.
I can't give you a direct answer, and a lot of it depends on the application you are doing and how its drawing algorithm compares to X. It also depends on what settings you have on your VNC. (And I am assuming we're talking a VNC client on Windows and a VNC server on UNIX.)
I can say that Netscape on X-Windows over a VPN was DOG SLOW to the point of being near unusuable (Netscape mail, specifically). Switching to VNC over my VPN made things dramatically faster.
Of course, VNC doesn't quite act the same as a perfect X interface.
If there is just *one* thing that I would ask of Slashdot (and yes, maybe even pay a "subscription" for) is a proofreader.
Just a single person. Their entire job is to simply run a posting through a spell-checker/grammar-checker, and look for glaring problems. The proofreader would also read the linked-to article and make sure that the story jives with it.
This is a simple low-pay position that I'm sure VA Linux can afford, and would help protect the reputation of their Slashdot property. Minimum wage. Maybe someone with a degree in English. Probably dozens of those lying around your local bookstore.
Slashdot Mirror
This certainly raises an eyebrow, but I cannot see how it provides any value to me (or the average consumer). It makes things even more mysterious! Given a choice between something that is well known, with a published clock rate, or a 'second tier brand' that hides information, I'd think it would give Intel and even BIGGER advantage. Unless, of course, for some stupid reason, Intel decides to do the same thing.
But really, for the AMD fan, this is an insult. Hopefully their marketing and PR people know some sort of angle to this beyond the obvious that will magically capture market share by removing its Mhz rating.
Performance benchmarks. Look at how much better an actual workload performs. But I don't see how it could hide it from the BIOS all that well.
Well, they're looking to fill the market that TiVo is refusing to touch... that is, the transfer of programs between TiVo units. And if it is able to transfer video, you can almost bet that it has an ethernet connector, and doesn't just do it over dialup. Good for them. Competition is going to make the PVR market better.
Regarding the 320 hours, that's going to be in low quality. I'm assuming that the ReplayTV has a two-drive limit. Either they are banking on future technology (2 x 128gb drives) or some additional compression, or both. (Additional compression is still possible, using existing methods. Anyone remember the TiVo bug where vertical resolution was lost, but was only noticable on SVideo units?)
In any case, I'm glad they're taking a stand on the sharing issue. That alone might be enough to make me switch.
Well, we've got one group wanting us to bring everything down to a level of a child so that it is safe for children. Then, we've got another group wanting us to bring everything down to 56k so it is safe for narrowband users. And you've got vision impaired users wanting to rid the net of graphics.
And I'm sure there are all sorts of other fringe groups wanting to protest this and that because of their own personal problems.
Anyone remember the South Park Christmas Play were anything offensive was removed? I'm glad the net won't have to give into everyone's demands.
The AC, unfortunately, has broadband envy. Give him a T1 connection, and you'll see his protest wither away.
BTW... do you know how hard it was going from a cable modem to a 33.6 dialup a few years ago? The pain was incredible. And I certainly wasn't blaming all the high speed users for it.
Wow. This is good stuff. Read their PDF report.
A very STRONG tip: if you are the respondant in a domain dispute, the other party gets to select which agency handles the dispute. Your only chance in counter-rigging the decision ahead of time is to pay (at a 50% discount) for a 3 member panel to hear the case. If they already paid for a 3 member panel, they've done you a service.
As a bonus, with a three party panel, YOU get to select one of the members! Further, the numbers show a STRONG statistical coorelation between 3 member panels (where the defendant makes an argument) and 1 member panels (where the defendant makes an argument) that are less leaned towards the party bringing the complaint.
Note of interest: when the party bringing the complaint paid for a 3 person panel, the three person panel also ruled in favor of the complaintant less often than on a 1 person panel.
Also interesting were the numbers at one of the arbitration agencies that (not the words of the researchers) pointed out a number of 'hanging judges'. And guess what? These hanging judges were assigned a disproportionate amount of the caseload.
What does this all say? Peer review. You're less likely to have a rogue judge if his actions are reviewed by other judges. And yes, they have pointed out rouge judges which have completely ignored the rules of arbitration.
Peer review is good for code, and it is good for arbitration.
These are some halfway decent ways of tracking what is going on with the root shell. Mind you, they aren't hackproof, but they make decent information for after-the-fact investigation:
Of course, enable your shell history. Also, turn on "lastcomm" so you can at least get the commands (but not the arguments) given at the shell prompt. Finally, more advanced versions of UNIX (I personally know HP/UX and Solaris do this) allow you to turn on snooping to system calls so you can log to disk all the nice commands and their arguments, like fork, accept, all types of disk access, etc.
Solaris has this included in something called "bsm" (basic security module) which comes with the OS. HP/UX you have to put into "trusted" mode and enable it through SAM. The logs it creates are very difficult to make an authentic looking fake for. Possible, though. Yes, syslogging to a remote host is a good idea.
Of course, a nice hacker would simply flood the syslogd that is keeping the logs... but you've got to decide how far you're going to go with all of this.
Also, there are some tools, like Sun's Configuration Service Tracker, which regularly scans the system and logs configuration changes.
Maybe there is a better way of doing all of this. But the layered approach seems to catch a lot of different things at a lot of different levels. All depending on how far you want to dig down into things.
GNG = Ghosts 'N Goblins. A delightful arcade game where you play a knight and you go around shooting and avoiding things, much like every other video game of its time.
I really think that just saying "GNU" itself isn't enough. I mean, Stallman has been the major contributor to GNU stuff. The name of GNU should be adjusted accordingly to represent that.
From now on, we should refer to this as Stallman/GNU in order to respect his view that the major contributor to a project should have its name in the title.
And, by supposition, he can then request the name "Stallman/GNU/Linux" for the Linux operating system. Its only fair.
If they would allow me to view movies in the timeframe that they are in the theater, or just before DVD rentals, this would provide value to me. Charge me as much as a seat in a movie theater, but keep the revenue all to yourself.
But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.
The movie industry is stuck in the same paradigm. They want to figure out where internet technology can be used to ADD to their current offerings. (Purely chasing up the revenue tree.) What they should be doing is asking, "What do our customers want?" But, there is that paradigm again. We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.
See how the whole mindset feeds on itself?
After reporting somewhere in the order of 10 bugs on the Slash 2.2 code, I really wish that you hadn't of gone live with this version. Mind you, a lot of bugs have been addressed, but there are quite a number still lurking out there. For example, I see that on the right some of the slash boxes don't have a grey background... they are white! And the journal area still looks a bit messed up.
Okay. As of this writing, it looks a bit better. But look at the icons in my journal entries. They are all broken. At least it is letting me post journal entries once again.
I also didn't expect that everything I did on Banjo would make it into production. I've got a lot of trash in my journal.
BTW, going to "Preferences" as AC was interesting. Talk about a Karma Whore. That UID has Karma through the roof.
But Commander, why didn't you all hold off a bit more before going live with the new version?
Wow. Somewhat of an interesting story for me. I just got through with a long car trip with the audio book of Linus' "Just For the Fun of It" to keep my brain occupied during the mind-numbing journey.
It talked a lot about Linus himself, how Linux started, his views on Open Source, politics and the meaning of life. (His take on the meaning of life was not insightful, but at least interesting.)
Did you know that Linux started out as an overgrown terminal emulation program to read USENET newsgroups from the University's computer, and ran under Minix?
Neat stuff. Linus was taken completely by surprise that Linux has gotten to where it is today. On one hand, had he known of all the work that was ahead of him, and that he'd be spending ten years of his life on it, he would have given up. But on the other hand, seeing all that it has done and the benefits that it has brought, he said he probably would have went forward with it.
If this sounds schizophrenic, at least according to the book, that partially describes a number of Linus' views. Like on intellectual property.
Anyhow, glad to read there will be a Linux anniversary celebration, and for an intersting commute, pick up the audio book. Five CD's full.
Whew. I've spent too much time on this. Over the past few hours, I have recorded at least 10 bugs in the new code. Some of it is minor display stuff. Others deal with serious things like the complete mistreatment of A HREF and /A.
The area of the new Slash code with the greatest number of bugs in the Journals. But that is a completely new feature, so I won't entirely bitch.
And someone just hosed the page numbering code so where you've got pages 0 and 1 on an article (which don't link to the next page). You have to manually modify the "startat" in the URL to get to page #2.
I wouldn't say that it was ready for a public beta. If the Slash people thought it was, they need a team of good testers to poke holes in this stuff. Lotsa flaws.
Oh... BTW, things like TROLLTALK and all are gone! But oddly enough, you can still create your own personal SID forum, with a Slash generated number, by using one of the special pages.
Lots of interesting changes, though.
The URL given (at least at this time of writing) is http://content.techweb.com/voices/harrow/harrow.ht ml which, at least as of this date, is talking about USB. And will probably be talking about something completely different, come the end of August, when this story is set to be published.
This early advance warning about this article being in the system was provided courtesy of Banjo!
Here is the link.
I don't think my last post did an elegant job on it. We all know that the code that allows you to bypass the Macrovision CD copy protection is a DMCA violation. That should be obvious.
But isn't it just as much of a violation to bypass the Macrovision copy protection via sampling an audio stream, or recording the analog stream to another device?
By doing so, you are bypassing their mechanism to prevent the CD from being copied. And nothing in the DMCA says that it has to be 100% effective against all means of copying.
So does that make analog copying a violation because you are bypassing the digital protection?
Doesn't that make an audio CD player a device for copyright protection circumvention? If it won't play in a computer CDROM when reading the raw data, it would seem that using an audio cd player to make a copy is circumventing the copy protection!
http://www.hackhu.com is gone. Actually, even their goodbye message is gone now. They said they were folding because of the threat of DirecTV hounding them into the ground. It was *the* source for great information on the DirecTV war.
I can see DirecTV 'going through the motions' trying to scare subscribers. I can also see them actually prosecuting a handful of little people just to put up a good front. But I really don't see them nailing the end user. Just scaring the bejezus out of most of them into, 'Gee. Should I subscribe to this site that has the latest emulator code? DirecTV might get my subscription information and go after me!'
We start in the cubicle and have them talk about their current and past job. The kind of things they did. The kinds of machines they worked with. The kind of environment it is.
Then, we go into the technical questions. Things they should be able to explain. Like when you use 'uptime' (or 'w'), what do the three numbers after 'load average' represent? Here. Run a command on this box and tell me how many processors it has, what speed, and how much memory. I run 'top' on a busy production box and have them describe what they see. That kind of thing.
Also, I give them a tour of the datacenter and, while we're in there, have them identify some simple things like cards. Or I'll poing to a Sun E4000 and ask them to tell me, in general terms, about the E4000 server and what it is capable of. I might ask what the difference between the E4000 and E4500 is.
Yes, I also see how they respond to questions they don't know the answer to. But a lot of what I look for is personality. How well they're going to get along with the group and others.
...or at least, a recent survey that was strikingly similar to this if it wasn't the same one [an advertiser at AVS Forum], it was an online survey with checkboxes. (And they were a little confusing at times.) A rate of anything around 10% or below should be ignored.
PVRs are great. I just hope the media doesn't become paranoid over them and somehow manage to ruin a good thing. Besides, I (like they asked on the survey) actually will stop FF'ing to view commercials that look entertaining or interest me. I keep on gliding past for Tampax and the rest.
Something like this was discussed in the AVS TiVo Forum not to long ago. The idea was that you could have your normal TiVo set of disk(s), and then you could have a second instance of TiVo that you use for programs you want to store long term.
Wow. It's been in front of us all along, and we haven't seen it. They ARE communicating with us via regular flashes of light. And it takes a very advanced level of technology to create.
;)
They're called pulsars.
I think out of all the following:
Microsoft Legal, Microsoft Applications, Microsoft Hardware, Microsoft Marketing, Microsoft Operating system
The two I'd be most afraid of are: Microsoft Legal and Microsoft Marketing.
They are the only two departments in Microsoft that have enough chutzpah to kill their own parents, and then beg for mercy because they have recently become orphans.
I certainly can't complain. I consistantly measure at 2-3Mbps on my download stream. I've never seen it go below 1Mpbs that was due to anything but the remote site being slow/jammed.
Of course, with a 56k modem, you don't have to worry too much about local (or remote) traffic conditions. You're too slow to stress anyone.
Try that DSLREPORT site. Very handy.
I hope they follow the actual route through the cities. I live on a road that used to be route 66. It even still has the markers on the sidewalk.
I can't give you a direct answer, and a lot of it depends on the application you are doing and how its drawing algorithm compares to X. It also depends on what settings you have on your VNC. (And I am assuming we're talking a VNC client on Windows and a VNC server on UNIX.)
I can say that Netscape on X-Windows over a VPN was DOG SLOW to the point of being near unusuable (Netscape mail, specifically). Switching to VNC over my VPN made things dramatically faster.
Of course, VNC doesn't quite act the same as a perfect X interface.
If there is just *one* thing that I would ask of Slashdot (and yes, maybe even pay a "subscription" for) is a proofreader.
Just a single person. Their entire job is to simply run a posting through a spell-checker/grammar-checker, and look for glaring problems. The proofreader would also read the linked-to article and make sure that the story jives with it.
This is a simple low-pay position that I'm sure VA Linux can afford, and would help protect the reputation of their Slashdot property. Minimum wage. Maybe someone with a degree in English. Probably dozens of those lying around your local bookstore.