In the case of Linux, the problem is the kernel is an unstable target. A driver written for the 2.2 kernel won't work with the 2.4 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users aren't going to compile their own kernel and drivers. So you need packaged versions. What distros do you package for? What versions of that distro? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
In the case of Windows, the problem is the OS is an unstable target. A driver written for the '98 kernel won't work with the 2000 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users are going to use an OEM install. What OEMs do you package for? What service pack of that variant? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
I'm being a little facetious:) (yes I understand that a kernel patch/module is quite a lot more pain to make compatible across different versions than a Windows driver), but Windows drivers are not without their problems too. Hardware people just put up with them because of the size of the market. People like nVidia who have made fully unified drivers for all OS versions and all cards have done very similar and very successful things on Linux in the same way.
Really, I figured someone would have said this by now (maybe they have and I need to refresh again:) but what this guy really needs is
LyX. It's basically a pretty word-processor-style front end for LaTeX. The help files and tutorial explicitly tell you that LyX follows a "WYSIWYM" principle -- What You See Is What You Mean. It tries to avoid pushing details like formatting into the writer's head, and instead focuses on getting the words organized into a meaningful structure. The program takes care of formatting everything based on the style you choose (you can choose any style at any time and the whole doc reflects it on the next preview). It's more or less the whole MVC paradigm that the XML/XSL folks push, but it's actually practical.
After discovering it I became a lot more productive with my writing. Admittedly that was limited mostly to writing college papers, but I spent a lot less time fighting with the word processor over formatting, focused on the writing, and the output was usually awesome looking.
YMMV I guess, if you're a formatting control freak then LyX won't work so well for you. Sometimes it's tough to make it do exactly what you want in the formatting phase too, so I eventually switched to using raw LaTeX or TeX for my docs, but LyX is a good middle of the road solution.
Here in the netherlands at least, both the major broadband providers (UPC adn KPN)give all customers a generically routable IP.
...
Does anyone have different experience elsewhere? The States, for instance? I'd like to hear.
Not only do most (all?) of the US broadband providers give you a globally routable IP, many of them actually get angry with you if you try to use NAT, because they want to have a one IP to one machine mapping for charging your account. Comcast in particular even has language in their AUP that says they may take legal action against you if you try to use NAT to install more machines (which is totally stupid, but there it is).
I've got a lot of respect for Walker in other areas, but this NAT rant is just barking up the wrong tree. NAT boxes are installed by users so that they can get more functionality out of the limited IPs available to them, not by ISPs to limit the users. I know Cox cable will help you install a NAT network, but they by no means require it or lock it down. At any time you could simply plug your machine straight into the internet and be just like everyone else. Or get a better NAT box!
On the other hand, saying that the internet is transitioning to a client/server architecture at the hands of corporate overlords isn't a big stretch at all (limited upstream, blocking HTTP ports, etc) but it has nothing to do with NAT.
Anyway, as others have said, if he is just tired of writing the program for a perceivably uninterested audience, he should just stop and turn it over to an SF project, like he's done. No need for this NAT rant...
I met these guys (and gal:) at CGE 2k3, they are good people with some neat products. He's also made Amiga ethernet adapters as well as what looked like a homebrew Catweasel (or maybe these are the people who made it to begin with?). Also these are the guys who sponsored Jeri to create the C-1 modernized C64 motherboard.
I also expect that to be the last such migration in my life time. It might be famous last words, however I do have trouble believing 64-bit processing and addressing will get outgrown by any software we'll be running on the desktop.
The PS2 has a full 128-bit processor. The EE (MIPS R5900) is based around a 32-bit MIPS design, has 32-bit instructions, etc, but all 32 of the general purpose registers are 128 bits wide. Really crazy. You can use those as real 128-bit registers, or you can split them up and do MMX-type operations on them. With a proper version of GCC, you can declare 128-bit variables without doing the long-long kludge on 64-bit values, etc.
I don't have a link to something about it right now, but you can probably google for one without much trouble (and it's described at length in the PS2 Linux PDFs). Either way, there's already a 128-bit processor out there! I acknowledge that you said "desktop software" and it's not like we all have them on our desks, but a few million people already have them in their living rooms;)
Oh and I almost forgot to mention -- getting married, and to a much, much larger degree, having kids takes up a huge amount of your time. Before that you have all your time to yourself to do whatever you want, and you're as likely as not to spend it changing the world or what have you. After the marriage, and especially after having kids, unless you're an asshole husband/father you end up needing to spend more time and attention elsewhere.
I have to somewhat question the cause and effect the article seems to suggest.
I agree the effect is there (I've been somewhat experiencing it myself over the past year, just got married a few weeks ago).
I think what's more likely though is that people who are young, brash, out to change the world, eventually get tired of doing so when they find something more emotionally rewarding to engage themselves in (like, oh, long term relationships and family). I used to stay up to all hours of the night and expend all my energy coding and doing all sorts of crazy stuff, working on my game projects, generally doing the sort of stuff he ascribes to pre-married people.
But now I find not so much that my drive is diminished, but I am kind of tired of the things I have always done and find it more rewarding to spend time with my current (and later on, future) family. You get a little older and start realizing that life maybe isn't as long as you thought it was going to be (infinite?) and as one of my friends used to say in a fake Scottish accent "get yer priorities straight, man!":)
Nowadays I only stay up for half the hours of the night, not all of them:D
*shrug* To each his/her own I guess, just relating my own experiences...
If the DRM / digital world sucks (for copyright or anything else) I believe that the market will have the right response....
The problem I see with this response (and it is quoted quite often on here) is that "the market" is deciding in favor of DRM as we speak. Go down to your local store and look at the selection of DVDs vs VHS. There's this little thing called CSS on DVDs, remember? That's where the fun all started, at least in the recent round of DRM attempts.
Ask your average person about DRM and they won't have a clue what you are talking about, because it has been implemented so seamlessly. Sure, they might get annoyed at the "no fast forward" parts of DVDs (the ones that infuriate me personally...) and they might have to buy a little box if they had an old TV with only coax in, but overall it does what they want and they're happy.
Oh and remember Macrovision? VHS has also had DRM for years and years, it was just much less sophisticated. Still quite difficult to bypass though.
Like boiling lobsters, you just raise the temperature a tiny bit at a time and people don't realize they're being baked.
I think the true travesty (and this article sort of hints at it but doesn't pursue) is that some day, we won't have DVD players. A thousand years in the future, there are going to be worthless chips of plastic and metal dug up and they will have no clue what it all means. They kept copious records back in "the old days" too, and we are able to piece together some of what happened and the culture back then thanks to it. Imagine how much harder the job will be when they have to go decyphering encryption schemes on top of all the other problems.
Hell, forget about 1000 years in the future -- think 50 years in the future! It makes me depressed just thinking about it. Even without DRM in the picture it's going to be depressingly difficult to keep updating all our media. Add a million DRM schemes and it starts looking like an insurmountable problem.
And if you want more, then grab our new game.:D We (Cryptic Allusion) just completed a new dance type game that integrates puzzle fighter style player-vs-player action and a "Typing of" mode. Indie all the way -- written using a free software/open source toolkit I maintain, and created entirely with Linux and free software tools. Even uses Ogg Vorbis!
Where Sega dropped the ball, there is a large community of homebrewers who are determined to pick it up and keep running the race. Dreamcasts are stupidly cheap now and really a quite decent little machine. And contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, there is more to do with them than run emulators and Linux!:)
Your system will run just as well with 10MB of free space verses 10GB of free space.
This isn't true on Unix either, but for a different reason. See the BSD manpage for tunefs for a hint:
-m minfree Specify the percentage of space held back from normal users; the minimum free space threshold. The default value used is 8%. This value can be set to zero, however up to a factor of three in throughput will be lost over the performance obtained at a 10% threshold. Settings of 5% and less force space optimization to always be used which will greatly increase the overhead for file writes. Note that if the value is raised above the current usage level, users will be unable to allocate files until enough files have been deleted to get under the higher threshold.
This is one of the reasons why Unix has always had a "reserve space for root", besides making sure things like logfiles can get written even if a user screws up.
Newer FSes like reiserfs don't have this option anymore (last I checked anyway), so maybe they are more efficient about it. I've never seen any Linux docs make a similar claim, but I'd imagine that however it's implemented having a small amount of free space is also going to force higher block fragmentation.
I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
So you also believe that all nicotine based products (cigarettes, etc) and alcohol should be criminalized, right? No really, this is a serious question. I have yet to logically reconcile in my head how people can talk about the evils of "drugs" on one hand, and then binge on them with the other. Oh, they aren't making your drugs illegal! Ok, that explains it all.
I know people who have destroyed their bodies and their lives by buying cartons of cigarettes per week, and I need not even go into the alcohol issues. And before anyone responds in the negative, think about all the deaths and injuries caused by drunk driving.
Note: I'm NOT advocating making all those substances criminal. I'm not advocating anything at all with my post. It's a devil's advocate statement that I'd like to see the "war on drugs" people answer.
I just wanted to extend a big thanks to sFlow for posting this paper (and the AT&T people for posting theirs). Despite the fact that DARPA screwed Theo & Co, they are probably already adding a "modulate TTL" setting to pf as we speak.
And of course if you're ultra-paranoid, then just use something like socks or squid to proxy most or all of your TCP connections, and it's 100% indistinguishable from your firewall making the connections out. Because your firewall is making the connections out.
When will they learn?
Kinda irritates me that stuff like this may make my nice all-in-a-box Netgear NAT useless some day, but it's nice to know that people like OpenBSD are there to back us up.
And like someone else said, what exactly does the cable company expect me to do? Expose all of my internal network to the internet? Cha right! They wouldn't even give me more than 3 IPs anyway!
Including the egg imagery that is so prevalent. How do the eggs fit into the resurrection anyway? That's something I never understood.
Sorry to feed a true troll, but someone needs to correct this misconception if it's going to be used to attack people. This has been a fertility holiday and a welcoming of spring for much much longer than Christianity has been around. You're welcome to use it for your own purposes, but quit the nonsense about it being a purely Christian holiday.
I find it hard to believe that spammers aren't already accustomed to these techniques, and haven't had stuff built into their software to remove phrases like "NOSPAM". Apparently they haven't, but...
What I like to do, and what I see as a future-proof way of handling this, is to reverse the @ and the . in my email address (see comment header for example). That way if there is a "clever" spam harvesting program at work, it'll either throw it out (domain name too short) or it'll start sending spam emails to Network Solutions. I win either way!:)
My "business" email (on cagames.com) has been posted this way for a good 6 months now and hasn't received a single piece of spam.
For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with.rpm and.deb, if not essentially impossible.
When you're done plugging Gentoo, do some actual research on Debian.:) This is exactly how a number of packages in non-free work (RealPlayer, a couple of different JDK installers, etc...)
I see no reason besides convention that this couldn't be done with RPMs as well. They have pre and post install scripts, and they could simply print something on the console pre-install telling the user to download something, then unpack it into the proper place when they continue. Not as consistent and friendly as debconf (or whatever Gentoo probably has) but it's possible. Or they could even put it in the RPM description and assume the user did it or refuse to install.
Yes, I agree. When I first came to my current day job back in about '98, they had a little toaster oven they used for the completion of SMT boards. I think now they just send the boards out to be produced and populated elsewhere (it's cheaper that way once you reach a certain point) but they were most definitely doing it for a long while before that.
How do you guys think Ball Grid Array packages are mounted on a board?:) These are the chips (like embedded PPC) that just have a big matrix of solder balls on the bottom which are soldered to the board.
Which reminds me of this humorous episode where a guy pulled down the oven from the shelf and cooked his lunch in it, not knowing what it was... and when we learned what had happened we all just about shit a brick. He didn't get lead poisoning or anything though.
Long mode consists of 64-bit and compatibility modes. Legacy mode consists of protected mode, vm86 and real mode. vm86 is not generally needed anymore as there are so few real mode apps that are run within protected mode. Athlon64 is the future, without giving up the present. (my highlighting)
I don't think I'm getting confused at all -- the point I just highlighted above is my contention. I don't think vm86 mode is useless anymore, there are still plenty of good uses for it. According to the diagram, long mode's compatability mode (which is what you've got to use if you want the 64-bit extensions but still want old x86 code) doesn't support vm86 at all. So if you boot up your Windows64 or whatever, you won't be able to run any DOS programs or anything else that uses the vm86 mode unless they run it under an emulator like Bochs.
I dunno, that might be an OK solution with the processors as fast as they are these days, just seems like kind of a strange design decision if they're trying to tout compatability as one of the benefits. It sure as hell beats the Itanic;)
Maybe I missed it somewhere in the article, but I was kind of disturbed by the diagram showing what's possible in what modes. What it looks like they are saying is that in "legacy" mode, you can only run 32-bit code, and you must run a 32-bit OS. And in "long" mode, you must run a 64-bit OS, and v86 mode is not supported at all.
If a new x86-64 OS that takes advantage of the 64-bit extensions can no longer run v86 code, then this is going to be a serious hamper on adoption! There are still tons of reasons to run 16-bit code, like the BIOS-init in XFree86, DOS emulators, and of course we all know about Windows (though that is changing mostly with the adoption of NT as a home platform). I mean over time things are going to support 32-bit/64-bit code more and more (in the bios and such) but I thought the compatability was the whole point here...
Is this going to require some sort of trick like IBM used on the 286 with OS/2?* Can someone in the know post about this?
* Back when the 286 was brand spanking new and IBM was developing OS/2, they of course wanted to use the new protected mode. Only problem was, Intel didn't build in a way to switch out of protected mode! So if they wanted to run an old fashioned 8086 task (or any 8086 code) they ended up doing something that was described by the developers as "turning off the engine at 60mph" -- they'd actually completely reset the CPU and put in some glue to make it jump back into the OS image instead of the BIOS. Which is how it exited 286 protected mode:)
I'm one of the co-owners of
an independent game company right now so I feel like I have a few things to say on this subject. His premise is flawed, IMO.
First of all, we heard this same argument on the Dreamcast homebrew development list back in the day when John Byrd (Sega DTS guy) was on there. He literally said that a couple of guys in a garage can't make a game these days. It was basically the same thing Peter Molyneux is saying now. I told him it was BS then, and I'll say it's BS about this as well.
The problem is one of scope. This same thing applies to movie makers, musicians, anyone. If you start out with the goal of wanting to be a world-wide phenominon, then you are probably going to fail unless you have the bookoo bucks. That's not how normal business people start though. You find yourself a niche somewhere where you can establish yourself, and then you work upwards from there. If you're passionate about it and stay on it hard, and more importantly if you have the talent, then you'll usually get a couple of key breaks eventually. If you don't, then perhaps you should try something else. Or, if you're like me, there's probably no failure too grand to keep you away from it.:)
You also have to look at the indie film and music scenes to see how this works, it's not that difficult. You find something you can do within the budget you have available to you; you spend time and track down people who have similar interests; and then you band together and make something that will lift all of you up to the next budget level so you can produce something more interesting next time. It takes patience, yes. It definitely takes a load of hard work. But you don't need a "worldwide AAA game" to be successful, just enough to pay yourself to continue your work.
There is also, of course, an element of "right place at the right time" but that tends to be purely luck (though it can be engineered occasionally).
And before any of the trolls start... our budget: $0 and a few hours of free time each day.
When are the MPAA and the RIAA going to realize that while they may be losing money, is isn't close to that magnitude?
I think they're fully aware of that. It's all a matter of political spin-doctoring, kinda like Sun claiming that Mitnick costed them 3 billion dollars, or whatever they claimed. They just add up the cost of what people would have paid if they'd bought the downloaded files at retail prices, regardless of whether the person subsequently did that (and/or bought even more stuff later on). The big numbers sound more impressive to people who don't dig deeper to see where they came from and how unrealistic they are.
Remember, it's not the truth that matters here -- it's public opinion about the truth you give them!
Well, I congratulate you for actually reading most of my post. Above-average AC;)
As I mentioned though, the problem is the machine, not XP. A lot of friends of mine have assured me that they have XP running very nicely on their boxes, so I'm aware of that. If you have a well-running XP box on an Athlon then it's probably not a Via chipset. Any search for "Via XP" on Google will turn up hundreds of horror stories.
I've downloaded all the new drivers, tweaked all that stuff you've talked about, used X-Setup, installed AMD-specific XP patches, etc... nothing fixes the basic problems: disk access is DOG slow, and when I try to move windows or do other intensive graphics on the second monitor, the sound starts stuttering and getting staticy. Other people at my work have the same problem, and the common factor always seems to be the Via chipset.
Oh and I've got 1GB of RAM in the thing, so I really doubt that's the issue. On the other hand, it's being used for Visual Studio.NET, so perhaps that's not enough:)
My point, though, is that just because a machine is brand new doesn't make it "the shit", and just because it's old doesn't make it shit:)
On the other hand it appears to operating faster even in X which says alot as it is an old Celeron 500 and was not real suited to running X. Not that I use X much. I use it mostly as a MySQL and Samba server for my home/office net.
Whoa.. what planet are you from?:) My main desktop is a dual Celery 500 (has been for about 3 years now). I have only one complaint about the speed, and that's G++ compiling (which is slow for everyone...). I use this for lots of C development work, Java, Mozilla, heavy mail usage, it's got a web server, MySQL instance... it's not a slow machine!
(Maybe if you put KDE/Gnome on it, but I use Golem instead. I wouldn't use KDE/Gnome if someone paid me to do so...)
Sadly, this machine feels at least 3-4 times faster than the Athlon XP 1900+ running XP across the room that work sent me. And that's after removing Explorer and replacing it with LiteStep. It's got one of those super-crappy Via chipsets though, so that's not really even the same universe;)
I have a FreeBSD server running on a K62-266 w/64MB of RAM, and re-soldered motherboard traces for the HD (scratched 'em off during a case transplant one time). It is appropriately named "Dixie" for the Neuromancer fans out there.:) It runs Samba, NFS, MySQL, Apache+PHP, Squid, and djbdns in both cache and serve modes. Works great, less filling:)
I dunno. I know you weren't making a big point out of the celery thing, I just don't understand why people feel like hardware is useless if it's more than a GHz behind the fastest hardware.
They talk in this about "mappers" who build mental maps in their minds that describe meta processes vs "packers" who simply try to memorize packets of information which may be reassembled later to perform various tasks. Very interesting read, and very on-target, I thought.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of Linux, the problem is the kernel is an unstable target. A driver written for the 2.2 kernel won't work with the 2.4 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users aren't going to compile their own kernel and drivers. So you need packaged versions. What distros do you package for? What versions of that distro? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
In the case of Windows, the problem is the OS is an unstable target. A driver written for the '98 kernel won't work with the 2000 kernel. Sometimes even a point release will break compatibility.
Now factor in that most users are going to use an OEM install. What OEMs do you package for? What service pack of that variant? It very quickly becomes a lot to maintain for little benefit.
I'm being a little facetious :) (yes I understand that a kernel patch/module is quite a lot more pain to make compatible across different versions than a Windows driver), but Windows drivers are not without their problems too. Hardware people just put up with them because of the size of the market. People like nVidia who have made fully unified drivers for all OS versions and all cards have done very similar and very successful things on Linux in the same way.
My wife quipped that the obvious name for the huge box set that includes everything (Revisited, Reloaded, Revolutions) is The Matrix: Repackaged :)
Really, I figured someone would have said this by now (maybe they have and I need to refresh again :) but what this guy really needs is
LyX. It's basically a pretty word-processor-style front end for LaTeX. The help files and tutorial explicitly tell you that LyX follows a "WYSIWYM" principle -- What You See Is What You Mean. It tries to avoid pushing details like formatting into the writer's head, and instead focuses on getting the words organized into a meaningful structure. The program takes care of formatting everything based on the style you choose (you can choose any style at any time and the whole doc reflects it on the next preview). It's more or less the whole MVC paradigm that the XML/XSL folks push, but it's actually practical.
After discovering it I became a lot more productive with my writing. Admittedly that was limited mostly to writing college papers, but I spent a lot less time fighting with the word processor over formatting, focused on the writing, and the output was usually awesome looking.
YMMV I guess, if you're a formatting control freak then LyX won't work so well for you. Sometimes it's tough to make it do exactly what you want in the formatting phase too, so I eventually switched to using raw LaTeX or TeX for my docs, but LyX is a good middle of the road solution.
Here in the netherlands at least, both the major broadband providers (UPC adn KPN)give all customers a generically routable IP.
...
Does anyone have different experience elsewhere? The States, for instance? I'd like to hear.
Not only do most (all?) of the US broadband providers give you a globally routable IP, many of them actually get angry with you if you try to use NAT, because they want to have a one IP to one machine mapping for charging your account. Comcast in particular even has language in their AUP that says they may take legal action against you if you try to use NAT to install more machines (which is totally stupid, but there it is).
I've got a lot of respect for Walker in other areas, but this NAT rant is just barking up the wrong tree. NAT boxes are installed by users so that they can get more functionality out of the limited IPs available to them, not by ISPs to limit the users. I know Cox cable will help you install a NAT network, but they by no means require it or lock it down. At any time you could simply plug your machine straight into the internet and be just like everyone else. Or get a better NAT box!
On the other hand, saying that the internet is transitioning to a client/server architecture at the hands of corporate overlords isn't a big stretch at all (limited upstream, blocking HTTP ports, etc) but it has nothing to do with NAT.
Anyway, as others have said, if he is just tired of writing the program for a perceivably uninterested audience, he should just stop and turn it over to an SF project, like he's done. No need for this NAT rant...
I met these guys (and gal :) at CGE 2k3, they are good people with some neat products. He's also made Amiga ethernet adapters as well as what looked like a homebrew Catweasel (or maybe these are the people who made it to begin with?). Also these are the guys who sponsored Jeri to create the C-1 modernized C64 motherboard.
I also expect that to be the last such migration in my life time. It might be famous last words, however I do have trouble believing 64-bit processing and addressing will get outgrown by any software we'll be running on the desktop.
The PS2 has a full 128-bit processor. The EE (MIPS R5900) is based around a 32-bit MIPS design, has 32-bit instructions, etc, but all 32 of the general purpose registers are 128 bits wide. Really crazy. You can use those as real 128-bit registers, or you can split them up and do MMX-type operations on them. With a proper version of GCC, you can declare 128-bit variables without doing the long-long kludge on 64-bit values, etc.
I don't have a link to something about it right now, but you can probably google for one without much trouble (and it's described at length in the PS2 Linux PDFs). Either way, there's already a 128-bit processor out there! I acknowledge that you said "desktop software" and it's not like we all have them on our desks, but a few million people already have them in their living rooms ;)
Oh and I almost forgot to mention -- getting married, and to a much, much larger degree, having kids takes up a huge amount of your time. Before that you have all your time to yourself to do whatever you want, and you're as likely as not to spend it changing the world or what have you. After the marriage, and especially after having kids, unless you're an asshole husband/father you end up needing to spend more time and attention elsewhere.
I have to somewhat question the cause and effect the article seems to suggest.
:)
:D
I agree the effect is there (I've been somewhat experiencing it myself over the past year, just got married a few weeks ago).
I think what's more likely though is that people who are young, brash, out to change the world, eventually get tired of doing so when they find something more emotionally rewarding to engage themselves in (like, oh, long term relationships and family). I used to stay up to all hours of the night and expend all my energy coding and doing all sorts of crazy stuff, working on my game projects, generally doing the sort of stuff he ascribes to pre-married people.
But now I find not so much that my drive is diminished, but I am kind of tired of the things I have always done and find it more rewarding to spend time with my current (and later on, future) family. You get a little older and start realizing that life maybe isn't as long as you thought it was going to be (infinite?) and as one of my friends used to say in a fake Scottish accent "get yer priorities straight, man!"
Nowadays I only stay up for half the hours of the night, not all of them
*shrug* To each his/her own I guess, just relating my own experiences...
If the DRM / digital world sucks (for copyright or anything else) I believe that the market will have the right response....
The problem I see with this response (and it is quoted quite often on here) is that "the market" is deciding in favor of DRM as we speak. Go down to your local store and look at the selection of DVDs vs VHS. There's this little thing called CSS on DVDs, remember? That's where the fun all started, at least in the recent round of DRM attempts.
Ask your average person about DRM and they won't have a clue what you are talking about, because it has been implemented so seamlessly. Sure, they might get annoyed at the "no fast forward" parts of DVDs (the ones that infuriate me personally...) and they might have to buy a little box if they had an old TV with only coax in, but overall it does what they want and they're happy.
Oh and remember Macrovision? VHS has also had DRM for years and years, it was just much less sophisticated. Still quite difficult to bypass though.
Like boiling lobsters, you just raise the temperature a tiny bit at a time and people don't realize they're being baked.
I think the true travesty (and this article sort of hints at it but doesn't pursue) is that some day, we won't have DVD players. A thousand years in the future, there are going to be worthless chips of plastic and metal dug up and they will have no clue what it all means. They kept copious records back in "the old days" too, and we are able to piece together some of what happened and the culture back then thanks to it. Imagine how much harder the job will be when they have to go decyphering encryption schemes on top of all the other problems.
Hell, forget about 1000 years in the future -- think 50 years in the future! It makes me depressed just thinking about it. Even without DRM in the picture it's going to be depressingly difficult to keep updating all our media. Add a million DRM schemes and it starts looking like an insurmountable problem.
Initialize Shameless Plug Engine 2.0...
And if you want more, then grab our new game. :D We (Cryptic Allusion) just completed a new dance type game that integrates puzzle fighter style player-vs-player action and a "Typing of" mode. Indie all the way -- written using a free software/open source toolkit I maintain, and created entirely with Linux and free software tools. Even uses Ogg Vorbis!
Feet of Fury
Where Sega dropped the ball, there is a large community of homebrewers who are determined to pick it up and keep running the race. Dreamcasts are stupidly cheap now and really a quite decent little machine. And contrary to popular Slashdot opinion, there is more to do with them than run emulators and Linux! :)
Your system will run just as well with 10MB of free space verses 10GB of free space.
This isn't true on Unix either, but for a different reason. See the BSD manpage for tunefs for a hint:
This is one of the reasons why Unix has always had a "reserve space for root", besides making sure things like logfiles can get written even if a user screws up.
Newer FSes like reiserfs don't have this option anymore (last I checked anyway), so maybe they are more efficient about it. I've never seen any Linux docs make a similar claim, but I'd imagine that however it's implemented having a small amount of free space is also going to force higher block fragmentation.
I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
So you also believe that all nicotine based products (cigarettes, etc) and alcohol should be criminalized, right? No really, this is a serious question. I have yet to logically reconcile in my head how people can talk about the evils of "drugs" on one hand, and then binge on them with the other. Oh, they aren't making your drugs illegal! Ok, that explains it all.
I know people who have destroyed their bodies and their lives by buying cartons of cigarettes per week, and I need not even go into the alcohol issues. And before anyone responds in the negative, think about all the deaths and injuries caused by drunk driving.
Note: I'm NOT advocating making all those substances criminal. I'm not advocating anything at all with my post. It's a devil's advocate statement that I'd like to see the "war on drugs" people answer.
I just wanted to extend a big thanks to sFlow for posting this paper (and the AT&T people for posting theirs). Despite the fact that DARPA screwed Theo & Co, they are probably already adding a "modulate TTL" setting to pf as we speak.
And of course if you're ultra-paranoid, then just use something like socks or squid to proxy most or all of your TCP connections, and it's 100% indistinguishable from your firewall making the connections out. Because your firewall is making the connections out.
When will they learn?
Kinda irritates me that stuff like this may make my nice all-in-a-box Netgear NAT useless some day, but it's nice to know that people like OpenBSD are there to back us up.
And like someone else said, what exactly does the cable company expect me to do? Expose all of my internal network to the internet? Cha right! They wouldn't even give me more than 3 IPs anyway!
If we want to maintain our freedom, we'll have to combat the fear of terrorism every bit as strongly as we fight terrorism itself.
Well, while everyone is quoting statesmen of yore, how about this one:
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself" -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Easter has always been about the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, no matter what you athiests try to say or "prove". You are just a troll.
Right. Sorry, play again:
Historical connotations of Easter
Including the egg imagery that is so prevalent. How do the eggs fit into the resurrection anyway? That's something I never understood.
Sorry to feed a true troll, but someone needs to correct this misconception if it's going to be used to attack people. This has been a fertility holiday and a welcoming of spring for much much longer than Christianity has been around. You're welcome to use it for your own purposes, but quit the nonsense about it being a purely Christian holiday.
I find it hard to believe that spammers aren't already accustomed to these techniques, and haven't had stuff built into their software to remove phrases like "NOSPAM". Apparently they haven't, but...
What I like to do, and what I see as a future-proof way of handling this, is to reverse the @ and the . in my email address (see comment header for example). That way if there is a "clever" spam harvesting program at work, it'll either throw it out (domain name too short) or it'll start sending spam emails to Network Solutions. I win either way! :)
My "business" email (on cagames.com) has been posted this way for a good 6 months now and hasn't received a single piece of spam.
For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with .rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.
When you're done plugging Gentoo, do some actual research on Debian. :) This is exactly how a number of packages in non-free work (RealPlayer, a couple of different JDK installers, etc...)
I see no reason besides convention that this couldn't be done with RPMs as well. They have pre and post install scripts, and they could simply print something on the console pre-install telling the user to download something, then unpack it into the proper place when they continue. Not as consistent and friendly as debconf (or whatever Gentoo probably has) but it's possible. Or they could even put it in the RPM description and assume the user did it or refuse to install.
Yes, I agree. When I first came to my current day job back in about '98, they had a little toaster oven they used for the completion of SMT boards. I think now they just send the boards out to be produced and populated elsewhere (it's cheaper that way once you reach a certain point) but they were most definitely doing it for a long while before that.
:) These are the chips (like embedded PPC) that just have a big matrix of solder balls on the bottom which are soldered to the board.
How do you guys think Ball Grid Array packages are mounted on a board?
Which reminds me of this humorous episode where a guy pulled down the oven from the shelf and cooked his lunch in it, not knowing what it was... and when we learned what had happened we all just about shit a brick. He didn't get lead poisoning or anything though.
Long mode consists of 64-bit and compatibility modes. Legacy mode consists of protected mode, vm86 and real mode. vm86 is not generally needed anymore as there are so few real mode apps that are run within protected mode. Athlon64 is the future, without giving up the present. (my highlighting)
I don't think I'm getting confused at all -- the point I just highlighted above is my contention. I don't think vm86 mode is useless anymore, there are still plenty of good uses for it. According to the diagram, long mode's compatability mode (which is what you've got to use if you want the 64-bit extensions but still want old x86 code) doesn't support vm86 at all. So if you boot up your Windows64 or whatever, you won't be able to run any DOS programs or anything else that uses the vm86 mode unless they run it under an emulator like Bochs.
I dunno, that might be an OK solution with the processors as fast as they are these days, just seems like kind of a strange design decision if they're trying to tout compatability as one of the benefits. It sure as hell beats the Itanic ;)
Maybe I missed it somewhere in the article, but I was kind of disturbed by the diagram showing what's possible in what modes. What it looks like they are saying is that in "legacy" mode, you can only run 32-bit code, and you must run a 32-bit OS. And in "long" mode, you must run a 64-bit OS, and v86 mode is not supported at all.
If a new x86-64 OS that takes advantage of the 64-bit extensions can no longer run v86 code, then this is going to be a serious hamper on adoption! There are still tons of reasons to run 16-bit code, like the BIOS-init in XFree86, DOS emulators, and of course we all know about Windows (though that is changing mostly with the adoption of NT as a home platform). I mean over time things are going to support 32-bit/64-bit code more and more (in the bios and such) but I thought the compatability was the whole point here...
Is this going to require some sort of trick like IBM used on the 286 with OS/2?* Can someone in the know post about this?
* Back when the 286 was brand spanking new and IBM was developing OS/2, they of course wanted to use the new protected mode. Only problem was, Intel didn't build in a way to switch out of protected mode! So if they wanted to run an old fashioned 8086 task (or any 8086 code) they ended up doing something that was described by the developers as "turning off the engine at 60mph" -- they'd actually completely reset the CPU and put in some glue to make it jump back into the OS image instead of the BIOS. Which is how it exited 286 protected mode :)
I'm one of the co-owners of an independent game company right now so I feel like I have a few things to say on this subject. His premise is flawed, IMO.
First of all, we heard this same argument on the Dreamcast homebrew development list back in the day when John Byrd (Sega DTS guy) was on there. He literally said that a couple of guys in a garage can't make a game these days. It was basically the same thing Peter Molyneux is saying now. I told him it was BS then, and I'll say it's BS about this as well.
The problem is one of scope. This same thing applies to movie makers, musicians, anyone. If you start out with the goal of wanting to be a world-wide phenominon, then you are probably going to fail unless you have the bookoo bucks. That's not how normal business people start though. You find yourself a niche somewhere where you can establish yourself, and then you work upwards from there. If you're passionate about it and stay on it hard, and more importantly if you have the talent, then you'll usually get a couple of key breaks eventually. If you don't, then perhaps you should try something else. Or, if you're like me, there's probably no failure too grand to keep you away from it. :)
You also have to look at the indie film and music scenes to see how this works, it's not that difficult. You find something you can do within the budget you have available to you; you spend time and track down people who have similar interests; and then you band together and make something that will lift all of you up to the next budget level so you can produce something more interesting next time. It takes patience, yes. It definitely takes a load of hard work. But you don't need a "worldwide AAA game" to be successful, just enough to pay yourself to continue your work.
There is also, of course, an element of "right place at the right time" but that tends to be purely luck (though it can be engineered occasionally).
And before any of the trolls start... our budget: $0 and a few hours of free time each day.
When are the MPAA and the RIAA going to realize that while they may be losing money, is isn't close to that magnitude?
I think they're fully aware of that. It's all a matter of political spin-doctoring, kinda like Sun claiming that Mitnick costed them 3 billion dollars, or whatever they claimed. They just add up the cost of what people would have paid if they'd bought the downloaded files at retail prices, regardless of whether the person subsequently did that (and/or bought even more stuff later on). The big numbers sound more impressive to people who don't dig deeper to see where they came from and how unrealistic they are.
Remember, it's not the truth that matters here -- it's public opinion about the truth you give them!
Well, I congratulate you for actually reading most of my post. Above-average AC ;)
As I mentioned though, the problem is the machine, not XP. A lot of friends of mine have assured me that they have XP running very nicely on their boxes, so I'm aware of that. If you have a well-running XP box on an Athlon then it's probably not a Via chipset. Any search for "Via XP" on Google will turn up hundreds of horror stories.
I've downloaded all the new drivers, tweaked all that stuff you've talked about, used X-Setup, installed AMD-specific XP patches, etc... nothing fixes the basic problems: disk access is DOG slow, and when I try to move windows or do other intensive graphics on the second monitor, the sound starts stuttering and getting staticy. Other people at my work have the same problem, and the common factor always seems to be the Via chipset.
Oh and I've got 1GB of RAM in the thing, so I really doubt that's the issue. On the other hand, it's being used for Visual Studio.NET, so perhaps that's not enough :)
My point, though, is that just because a machine is brand new doesn't make it "the shit", and just because it's old doesn't make it shit :)
On the other hand it appears to operating faster even in X which says alot as it is an old Celeron 500 and was not real suited to running X. Not that I use X much. I use it mostly as a MySQL and Samba server for my home/office net.
Whoa.. what planet are you from? :) My main desktop is a dual Celery 500 (has been for about 3 years now). I have only one complaint about the speed, and that's G++ compiling (which is slow for everyone...). I use this for lots of C development work, Java, Mozilla, heavy mail usage, it's got a web server, MySQL instance... it's not a slow machine!
(Maybe if you put KDE/Gnome on it, but I use Golem instead. I wouldn't use KDE/Gnome if someone paid me to do so...)
Sadly, this machine feels at least 3-4 times faster than the Athlon XP 1900+ running XP across the room that work sent me. And that's after removing Explorer and replacing it with LiteStep. It's got one of those super-crappy Via chipsets though, so that's not really even the same universe ;)
I have a FreeBSD server running on a K62-266 w/64MB of RAM, and re-soldered motherboard traces for the HD (scratched 'em off during a case transplant one time). It is appropriately named "Dixie" for the Neuromancer fans out there. :) It runs Samba, NFS, MySQL, Apache+PHP, Squid, and djbdns in both cache and serve modes. Works great, less filling :)
I dunno. I know you weren't making a big point out of the celery thing, I just don't understand why people feel like hardware is useless if it's more than a GHz behind the fastest hardware.
I figure it's time to dust off The Programmer's Stone since it sounds so very much like what you're describing.
Chapter 1 is especially relevant: Thinking About Thinking
They talk in this about "mappers" who build mental maps in their minds that describe meta processes vs "packers" who simply try to memorize packets of information which may be reassembled later to perform various tasks. Very interesting read, and very on-target, I thought.