Somebody mentioned that the reason for not releasing source is because of IP that was licensed by NVidia from an other company under a strict NDA.
Although my suggestion might not be appreciated by everyone, here's a simple solution to fix that problem: - NVidia creates a very simple/small driver that incoporates all the code that's protected under the NDA. To help us, that's about all the driver does,- no fancy interfaces, bells or whistles. - They distribute the binary and release all the register level specs for their device that is not under the NDA. -We reverse engineer the binary driver and use the spec to create an OS driver.
Nobody could stop NVidia from doing just that,- surely they have the right to distribute binaries for the IP that falls under NDA.
As an IT consultant with a leading agency engaged in research into the "free software" phenomenon ... operating systems such as GNU or Linux
Maybe you should do some more leading edge research and you'd find out that GNU is not much of an Operating System.
You choose to talk on the subject as if you where an expert, but even part-time Open Sourcers as myself can see why you posted this 'mark my words' FUD AC.
If there's any story that's about to be taken of/. because of total useless-ness in the comments it's probably this one. I have never seen so much off-topic and trolling crap.
Obviously this is related to the hate people feel when the name Jon Katz is dropped.
My question for Jon: To someone that really does not know much about you, can you explain what it is that you do that causes people to get so emotional?
It must bother you that so many people seem to only express anger without talking about 'content'. For this very reason it is very hard to understand for people like me what the hell is going on...
As others have pointed out in different responses, it's *worse* since credit cards have fraud limits - and that limit applies to all fradulent charges.
I don't know about that. We have a credit card of which the number must have been taken by someone in Florida when we where at a trade-show.
They started ordering stuff from one of these TV shows (jewelry or something) but only for small amounts. Since the card has a lot of charges on it and we travel a lot it took three months before we noticed it.
Well, the fine print reads that you have to notify them within a month or you are screwed. Fraud protection my ass. Yes, they will give you the company who charged it's information. Then you have to try to find out from that company where the goods where delivered (and why would they want to cooperate?). If you are lucky enough that you'll get that information out of them, then what? Call in the cops? We did, they laughed...
In other words, you spend hours and hours on the phone and the bottom line is: you lost your money.
I know now that you have to keep a very close eye on every statement for a credit card. This may sound obvious or stupid but when you have company cards with a hundred or more transactions per statement...
My method to detect e-mail spam is to use give companies companyname@mydomain.com as my email address
I do exactly that too! What was really funny when I needed to call Bank of America tech support because I couldn't get access to my account the where REALLY friendly, like to an absurd level.
I couldn't figure it until the guy askes like 'you ARE with BoA rite???'. I'm, of course, answering 'no'. And he sayes, Ohhh, I though from your email address (bankofamerica.com@mydomain.com) you where with our company!
Thaz pretty cute. Caracter is spelled 'character'.
And that sort of indicates you are prawly not american. That would also explain the comment 'these us newspapers must be very small'.
I'm not american either, but Imperator says that the information fits in 1K. That does not mean that the actual articles occupy 1K.
A little example to explain the difference: When I say 'the earth is a globe' one could say that that occupied 20 characters (including whitespace). But really it's no information to you because you allready knew that (presumably;o))
Only reading (viewing!) an actual american newspaper makes this perfectly clear. You should only feel blessed that you didn't have to experience this first hand.:)
if Rob counts all the flame he's getting in this list of comments.
I can only say one thing: "Freedom". Rob can do whatever the fsck he feels like with code he wrote. And that doesn't preclude him from being good for Open Source.
Maybe you complainers should consider that all the articles posted on/. are helping Open Source a great deal. I'd say possibly more than the source for this site will...
The accuracy: The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
From Windows point of view that is. Linux understands the Windows partitions just fine.
To remove Linux from your computer and install Windows 2000 or Windows NT, you must manually delete the partition used by the Linux operating system.
This suggest that you need to remove Linux in order to install Windows. Which is not true (unless you have all diskspace commited to Linux).
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap).
Yeah, I have Linux installed on a swap partition (82) and Windows is installed on win386.swp. Whatever.
The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from
I guess I'm being pedantic when I point out that you do not have to be using LILO as a boot manager.
"Superblock" in Linux terminology means that the Linux partition should be the active partition.
Oh, that's interesting then. I thought the superblock was basically what M$ calls the boot sector. But I might be mistaken. In any case, the term superblock does not mean that the partition should be active. It's just an area in the file system to store information. It's there whether the partition is active or not.
In the knowledge base article now follows an explanation on how to remove partitions. It's so comforting to know that someone that has just proved him/herself totaly imcompetent on the subject is going to 'guide' us through the removal of partitions...
Well, you are over-simplifying things a little here.
The remote control is going to be the easy part.
To record video you need compression. Why? Because recording raw video takes about 20GB for an hour, and that is low resolution (352x240). That's going to eat up harddisk space quickly, not to mention that you need a pretty decent drive to support the sustained datarate of 6MB/sec. If you wanted to play of the same drive, add an other 6MB/sec and seeking,- or just forget it.
I think the best bet for compression is MPEG (1 or 2). At least the standard is open and the quality is relatively good (there are better codec's out there, but I've never seen one with open standards that's better then MPEG)
But there's really no high performance compression software available for Linux. Same counts for MPEG decompression. I've seen the software MPEG decoder available for Linux and it really requires quite a fast CPU to get anywhere decent quality. This is because they have to make up for not being able to use the hardware optimizations that most any VGA chip has built in these days. (This is one of the major short-comming of Linux, as far as I'm concerned. It's the problem of the VGA chip manufacturers though because they are unwilling to release documentation quite frequently)
So in any case, you wanna run Linux, you gonna probably have to use hardware codec's. These exist but are relatively expensive,- more then a Tivo...:(
The simplest solution is to get a Windoze machine with a Voodoo 3500 TV. The only problem is that the software SUCKS! (,- the Voodoo 3500 software, we all know what Windoze is like) And you still can't playback and record at the same time (the MPEG-II software compression they use takes a lot o juice)
The interesting thing though is that several MPEG decoder manufacturers are now moving to codecs (encoder & decoder in one chip) because the market for decoders is disapearing (with PIII-500 machines doing full DVD decode in software). These new chips should be pretty cheap and hopefully one day we will be able to write Linux drivers for them.
:o) Thaz pretty kewl. I didn't even know you could do the,i=8,t=0 in a ?: statement. Always good to learn something.
Mind you that your version does assume there's only one whitespace tween the strings which is not the case for the Perl version. BUT it does work just fine.
You must be one of those obscure C contest programmers.;)
I have to completely agree. But he could have written something simpler like this:
#include <stdio.h> #include <ctype.h> void main( void ) { for(;;) { int c; int i; while( isspace( c = getc(stdin) ) ) ; if( c == EOF ) break; ungetc( c, stdin ); for( c = 0, i = 7 ; i >= 0 ; i-- ) c |= (getc(stdin) == '1') ? (1 i) : 0; putc( c, stdout ); } }
Which took me less than 10 minutes - I don't have too much time on my hands (or do I? what am I doing writing this stuff?) and I'm sure with a bit more time it could be even smaller.
Anyways, for those of us who STILL don't write Perl, well, we have to get by somehow...
I wouldn't be suprised if your math explanation is exactly where it came from. I'm just trying to figure it out so I can justify why I told her she was talking out of her ass...;o)
On the other hand, I'm sure that on average people know a lot more than 30 people. If you count unidirectionally knowing someone, it will be even higher.
Ahh! But! We are touching upon a _very_ important issue here: latency. Our's is tad high today, since she's in Europe and I'm in California. It'll prawly be around noon EDT before I get a response out of her.
An ICMP-like roundtrip could maybe be shorter than that (I have her hotel number), but the annoyance that that would generate would probably void the possibility to get a full blown TCP-like connection setup any day soon.
My girlfriend told me a while back that ALL people are only something like 5 or 6 people away from each other. (I guess as in a who-knows-who kind of way)
Anybody else knows more about this? (I can't verify it right now cause she's not here...:( )
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, I did.
Mine was shipped 24th of March. Got it today,- installing an alternative OS on the added harddrive rite now.
It's the same. Not even no-tamper stickers.
Breace.
Somebody mentioned that the reason for not releasing source is because of IP that was licensed by NVidia from an other company under a strict NDA.
Although my suggestion might not be appreciated by everyone, here's a simple solution to fix that problem:
- NVidia creates a very simple/small driver that incoporates all the code that's protected under the NDA. To help us, that's about all the driver does,- no fancy interfaces, bells or whistles.
- They distribute the binary and release all the register level specs for their device that is not under the NDA.
-We reverse engineer the binary driver and use the spec to create an OS driver.
Nobody could stop NVidia from doing just that,-
surely they have the right to distribute binaries for the IP that falls under NDA.
Breace
As an IT consultant with a leading agency engaged in research into the "free software" phenomenon
...
operating systems such as GNU or Linux
Maybe you should do some more leading edge research and you'd find out that GNU is not much of an Operating System.
You choose to talk on the subject as if you where an expert, but even part-time Open Sourcers as myself can see why you posted this 'mark my words' FUD AC.
Breace
Don't want to be pedantic or anything but:
(You know - the people who make the after-market memory chips)
is really wrong: Kingston does not make chips. They only make memory modules.
And in fact, in this particular context that's quite important: the Sun patents are about the modules NOT the chips...
Breace.
Dude, I wish you didn't post these AC. It's hillarious and if I where moderator your Karma would be through the roof! :o))
;o)
However, I don't know if it will work, because I'm even considering trolling now to get more of these out of ya.
Thankx for making the best out of otherwise anoying crap.
If there's any story that's about to be taken of /. because of total useless-ness in the comments it's probably this one. I have never seen so much off-topic and trolling crap.
Obviously this is related to the hate people feel when the name Jon Katz is dropped.
My question for Jon: To someone that really does not know much about you, can you explain what it is that you do that causes people to get so emotional?
It must bother you that so many people seem to only express anger without talking about 'content'. For this very reason it is very hard to understand for people like me what the hell is going on...
Breace.
Dude, I really don't mean this as a flame or something, but your Stanford account name 'snickell' is really funny to people from the Netherlands.
;)
;)
It would be comparable to 'dighead',- you get the point...
Sorry, it just made me laught and felt like letting you know. My Karma is a tad on the high side too...
As others have pointed out in different responses, it's *worse* since credit cards have fraud limits - and that limit applies to all fradulent charges.
I don't know about that. We have a credit card of which the number must have been taken by someone in Florida when we where at a trade-show.
They started ordering stuff from one of these TV shows (jewelry or something) but only for small amounts. Since the card has a lot of charges on it and we travel a lot it took three months before we noticed it.
Well, the fine print reads that you have to notify them within a month or you are screwed. Fraud protection my ass. Yes, they will give you the company who charged it's information. Then you have to try to find out from that company where the goods where delivered (and why would they want to cooperate?). If you are lucky enough that you'll get that information out of them, then what? Call in the cops? We did, they laughed...
In other words, you spend hours and hours on the phone and the bottom line is: you lost your money.
I know now that you have to keep a very close eye on every statement for a credit card. This may sound obvious or stupid but when you have company cards with a hundred or more transactions per statement...
Breace.
My method to detect e-mail spam is to use give companies companyname@mydomain.com as my email address
;)
I do exactly that too! What was really funny when I needed to call Bank of America tech support because I couldn't get access to my account the where REALLY friendly, like to an absurd level.
I couldn't figure it until the guy askes like 'you ARE with BoA rite???'. I'm, of course, answering 'no'. And he sayes, Ohhh, I though from your email address (bankofamerica.com@mydomain.com) you where with our company!
Must have been their 'internet-guru'...
Breace.
Yeah well, bad MS user me...
why not view the pages with a working browser such as Netscape or Lynx?
Because MSIE is doing the job just fine for me with 99.999% of the pages out there.
Besides, if I wanted to travel back in time I'd use something better than Lynx to accomplish that.
Breace.
Of course, if you had seen the announcement on http://www.LinuxNinja.com , you would know for sure that you are not color-blind.
Dude, I don't mind the shameless plug, but what the fsck is up with blue text on a blue background?
Breace.
Thaz pretty cute. Caracter is spelled 'character'.
;o))
:)
And that sort of indicates you are prawly not american. That would also explain the comment 'these us newspapers must be very small'.
I'm not american either, but Imperator says that the information fits in 1K. That does not mean that the actual articles occupy 1K.
A little example to explain the difference: When I say 'the earth is a globe' one could say that that occupied 20 characters (including whitespace). But really it's no information to you because you allready knew that (presumably
Only reading (viewing!) an actual american newspaper makes this perfectly clear. You should only feel blessed that you didn't have to experience this first hand.
Breace.
if Rob counts all the flame he's getting in this list of comments.
/. are helping Open Source a great deal. I'd say possibly more than the source for this site will...
I can only say one thing: "Freedom". Rob can do whatever the fsck he feels like with code he wrote. And that doesn't preclude him from being good for Open Source.
Maybe you complainers should consider that all the articles posted on
Breace.
That's funny. At this exact same comment I was just wondering that too.
The reason why is that I have been guilty of making similar statements, and guess what? Those where the comments that where moderated up like crazy.
Some interesting psychology going on here.
In any case, this is what Meta moderating is for I believe so we should probably not be posting this sort of stuff either.
Breace.
The accuracy:
The partition types used by the Linux and Windows operating systems are incompatible.
From Windows point of view that is. Linux understands the Windows partitions just fine.
To remove Linux from your computer and install Windows 2000 or Windows NT, you must manually delete the partition used by the Linux operating system.
This suggest that you need to remove Linux in order to install Windows. Which is not true (unless you have all diskspace commited to Linux).
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap).
Yeah, I have Linux installed on a swap partition (82) and Windows is installed on win386.swp. Whatever.
The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from
I guess I'm being pedantic when I point out that you do not have to be using LILO as a boot manager.
"Superblock" in Linux terminology means that the Linux partition should be the active partition.
Oh, that's interesting then. I thought the superblock was basically what M$ calls the boot sector. But I might be mistaken. In any case, the term superblock does not mean that the partition should be active. It's just an area in the file system to store information. It's there whether the partition is active or not.
In the knowledge base article now follows an explanation on how to remove partitions. It's so comforting to know that someone that has just proved him/herself totaly imcompetent on the subject is going to 'guide' us through the removal of partitions...
Breace.
Well, you are over-simplifying things a little here.
:(
The remote control is going to be the easy part.
To record video you need compression. Why? Because recording raw video takes about 20GB for an hour, and that is low resolution (352x240). That's going to eat up harddisk space quickly, not to mention that you need a pretty decent drive to support the sustained datarate of 6MB/sec. If you wanted to play of the same drive, add an other 6MB/sec and seeking,- or just forget it.
I think the best bet for compression is MPEG (1 or 2). At least the standard is open and the quality is relatively good (there are better codec's out there, but I've never seen one with open standards that's better then MPEG)
But there's really no high performance compression software available for Linux. Same counts for MPEG decompression. I've seen the software MPEG decoder available for Linux and it really requires quite a fast CPU to get anywhere decent quality. This is because they have to make up for not being able to use the hardware optimizations that most any VGA chip has built in these days. (This is one of the major short-comming of Linux, as far as I'm concerned. It's the problem of the VGA chip manufacturers though because they are unwilling to release documentation quite frequently)
So in any case, you wanna run Linux, you gonna probably have to use hardware codec's. These exist but are relatively expensive,- more then a Tivo...
The simplest solution is to get a Windoze machine with a Voodoo 3500 TV. The only problem is that the software SUCKS! (,- the Voodoo 3500 software, we all know what Windoze is like) And you still can't playback and record at the same time (the MPEG-II software compression they use takes a lot o juice)
The interesting thing though is that several MPEG decoder manufacturers are now moving to codecs (encoder & decoder in one chip) because the market for decoders is disapearing (with PIII-500 machines doing full DVD decode in software). These new chips should be pretty cheap and hopefully one day we will be able to write Linux drivers for them.
Then making a Tivo-a-like would be a breeze.
Have fun, Breace.
Of course, they could just fill in those gaps with DNA from frogs...
Well, a Mammoth that can leap two and a half miles? Sounds like the people in Siberia better get their roofs strengthend.
Breace.
Except that it hangs when it reaches EOF.
;)
Maybe should have taken two minutes
Breace.
:o) Thaz pretty kewl. ,i=8,t=0 in a ?: statement. Always good to learn something.
;)
I didn't even know you could do the
Mind you that your version does assume there's only one whitespace tween the strings which is not the case for the Perl version. BUT it does work just fine.
You must be one of those obscure C contest programmers.
Breace
Fsck. You do your previews and then still screw up. Should have been:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
void main( void ) {
for(;;) {
int c; int i;
while( isspace( c = getc(stdin) ) )
;
if( c == EOF )
break;
ungetc( c, stdin );
for( c = 0, i = 7 ; i >= 0 ; i-- )
c |= (getc(stdin) == '1') ? (1 << i) : 0;
putc( c, stdout );
}
}
I have to completely agree. But he could have written something simpler like this:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
void main( void ) {
for(;;) {
int c; int i;
while( isspace( c = getc(stdin) ) )
;
if( c == EOF )
break;
ungetc( c, stdin );
for( c = 0, i = 7 ; i >= 0 ; i-- )
c |= (getc(stdin) == '1') ? (1 i) : 0;
putc( c, stdout );
}
}
Which took me less than 10 minutes - I don't have too much time on my hands (or do I? what am I doing writing this stuff?) and I'm sure with a bit more time it could be even smaller.
Anyways, for those of us who STILL don't write Perl, well, we have to get by somehow...
Breace
... Japanese effort ...
/patriot mode on/
May I remind you that the article also credits the Dutch for that. And if it aint Dutch it aint mutch!
/patriot mode off/
Breace.
I wouldn't be suprised if your math explanation is exactly where it came from. I'm just trying to figure it out so I can justify why I told her she was talking out of her ass... ;o)
On the other hand, I'm sure that on average people know a lot more than 30 people. If you count unidirectionally knowing someone, it will be even higher.
Breace.
*grin*
Ahh! But! We are touching upon a _very_ important issue here: latency. Our's is tad high today, since she's in Europe and I'm in California. It'll prawly be around noon EDT before I get a response out of her.
An ICMP-like roundtrip could maybe be shorter than that (I have her hotel number), but the annoyance that that would generate would probably void the possibility to get a full blown TCP-like connection setup any day soon.
Breace.
My girlfriend told me a while back that ALL people are only something like 5 or 6 people away from each other. (I guess as in a who-knows-who kind of way)
:( )
Anybody else knows more about this?
(I can't verify it right now cause she's not here...
Breace.