Ummm... 1024x768x32bit = 25165824 bits. Cycling through these bits is exactly equivalent to the "counting up" problem you're responding to. Since we've already established we can't count that high, there's no danger anyone is ever going to show you ever possible picture. Given the thousands of possible variations of goatse guy, this is probably a good thing.
What should make you feel small is that physicist have figured out a way to count all the possible states for a particular volume of matter (assuming an upper bound on temperature, if that makes any difference). That means the entirety of the observable universe has only a finite number of possible states.
If the unobservable universe is infinite, and if states are distributed probabilistically (and why wouldn't they be?), that means that your hypothetical world where Julius Caesar wasn't murdered actually exists, out there, somewhere, far out of reach.
So they're replacing a proprietary cartridge system with a proprietary mini-DVD system? Hoor-fucking-ray. Obviously the reasoning behind this is to make the things harder to independantly produce, so they can maintain a vice-like grip on the games, and so they'll look like data discs always do in the movies.
Oooh, and they've got a great new business model! Let me take a stab at it... they're gonna market the thing like crazy to kids, and then sell the console at below cost to harrassed parents while conveniently forgetting to mention that they're going to need a second mortgage to buy any games for it. Am I close?
That's been there for years. All the people getting excited over this should probably pay more attention to their own boot sequence before worrying about other people's.
Or
ext2fs (why is it I lose a partition every time I pull the plug?).
I wouldn't exactly call this a bug. You shouldn't do this on any system that hasn't been specifically designed for it (and yes, that includes ones with journalling filesystems and MS-DOS). Besides which, maybe I'm just lucky, but fsck has cleaned up nicely every time I've failed to do a clean shutdown. Obviously it depends how busy the system is at the time, and the alignment of the stars, but if you're trashing your filesystem every time I can't help wondering if you're not just doing something wrong (in addition to pulling the plug in the first place, that is).
grope (GNU Rope) was gonna be a tool that does what it sounds like fur does, ie. re-order chunks of machine code in an executable to move bits of code that get used together next to each other, using profiling and what not. I got all excited about it, and then never heard of it again. Anyone out there know what happened to his project?
so keep in mind, the next t ime your child wants a nintendo game/console, that the Nintendo company used to run a whore house. betcha we never see a game like that.
If they'd stuck to the prostitution business my opinion of them would be much higher:-)
The most worrying thing about the DMCA, and its biggest weakness, is that it provides legal support for any usage restriction that can be implemented in technology. The restriction doesn't even need to work well, you just need to prove it's in there.
So, to defeat the DMCA, all you need to do is to implement a copy protection mechanism that does something clearly unconstitutional. Then all you need is a friend who can afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees to circumvent your copy protection mechanism. Oh, and of course you need to be able to afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees yourself so you can keep on sueing them all the way up the court system. But you didn't really expect to be able to change the law without being rich, did you?
I hate the way they exploit the ignorance of parents, with cheap consoles and massively overpriced games, and advertising targeted at young kids. It's scuzzy, and they deserve to go down.
We all know proprietary software is optimised for the first 5 minutes. Then it crashes. But how much does the first five minutes matter weighed against the overall life cycle of your use of a program? Yes, free software is harder to use at first. It is optimised for experienced users. But for most of the time you'll be using it, you will be an experienced user! Think about the long term!
In conclusion, I say we let proprietary software have that first five minutes. It has to be better for something!
He always seemed kinda creepy! What is he hiding behind that big beard & red suit? Why is always so keen to have little kids sit on his knee? What does he have to be so jolly about?
Now we know.
Maybe I should have read past the headline before posting... naaah.
Does anyone out there have a version of Netscape for Linux that can display a PNG without crashing? If major numbers of sites do switch to PNG, I'm gonna have to revert to an older version of Netscape unless the newer ones have fixed the bug.
Now where does this "right to share it" come from, please.
I suppose it comes by extension of the right to share anything else. If I want to let a friend live in my house rent-free, I do not expect the builder to be knocking on my door saying "sorry, you can't do that, you're threatening my livelihood". Yet software builders take their ability to dictate how their "houses" may be used for granted.
If you do not like something do not use it, full stop.
Now you know perfectly well that this isn't always an option. If it wasn't for the work of the GNU project, those of us who wanted to share our operating systems would have no legal choice at all. Even now, Microsoft is struggling to stop this choice being a viable one. Or are you suggesting those of us who don't like to be blackmailed into shrinkwrap contracts shouldn't use computers at all? That wouldn't leave us in a very good position in the 21st century.
We are not talking about things like medical drugs here, something no-one really considers worth to make free for countries in need of, but "just" software.
RMS himself has made it clear that he doesn't expect free software to save the world. But software freedom is an issue important enough to him that he has decided to devote his life to it, and I think it's worthy of our attention.
At the end of the day there is not just right or wrong but quite a lot in between.
Absolutely. I am not saying I think that Stallman is correct, I am saying that we should consider his arguments. Perhaps there is a moral imperative for free software.
A programmer who, by the sweat of his or her brow, produces a piece of software, owns that fruits of that labor. It belongs to them. End of story.
You're missing the point here. Does being the author of a program give you a right to restrict other people's right to share it? Conventional copyright law says yes. RMS says no. You need to distance yourself somewhat from the current legal framework to see the strength of RMS' arguments. A read through the GNU website is always worthwhile. Note the emphasis on the rights of the user, not the programmer. This is what Stallman cares about. You may not agree, but you can at least take the time to understand.
I am just having a hard time believing that the two of them could be so immature.
Believe it, baby! It's like WWF... tag team partners turned bitter enemies... locked in the cage of death! Though personally I think we should coat them in jam and have them wack at each other with foam rubber bananas.
Not that I'd accuse Jon Katz of plagiarism, after all, when they use the same plot for every episode it can't help sinking in after a while.
I can't help thinking that we should deal with little things like starvation and poverty before worrying about the MACHINES THAT ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD! OH MY GOD THEY'RE AT THE DOOR I CAN HEAR THEM THEY'RE COMING FOR ME THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE...
I am better now do not be alarmed everything is fine sit down and have a beer and watch the pretty pictures
Does that mean that if Kevin Mitnick linked to some MP3s, he would be freed too? Oh, but he's not allowed to touch a computer, so he won't get a chance. Still, it's a convenient loophole for lots of other guests of the state.
Time for Jon Katz to write an article about how MP3s are revolutioning the criminal justice system.
The great drawback of apache is that it forks for each new connection - this can eat up a lot of RAM very quickly.
This is untrue, unless you are using CGI scripts for dynamic content. Webservers that fork for each connection went out of mainstream use about 5 years ago. Apache uses a pre-forking model, meaning it has a "herd" of seperate processes each of which handles one connection at a time. Multi-threaded servers are more efficient, but the pre-forking model is optimum for stability.
While there are other webservers known faster for static content (Zeus comes to mind), I don't know where Apache stands for dynamic content. It probably depends what language you are using: mod_php4 is supposed to be very fast, and of course if you write a custom module in C you can make it as fast as it needs to be.
It should be noted that Zope can be used with several servers; Bruce Perens in fact uses it with Apache. It is not considered to be especially quick, it is the rich functionality and flexibility that people choose it for.
Philip Greenspun is rapturous in his praise of AOLServer; but then, he thinks we should be using dynamic content for everything, and I've never heard of anyone else who actually uses it (apart from AOL, obviously). Bear in mind that AOLServer is as tied to TCL as Zope is to Python.
I agree with the sentiment that meta-moderation is unnecessary, but I disgree with the idea of losing karma just because you don't follow the herd and moderate the same way the others do. Where's the allowance for sincere difference of opinion? I think that losing karma just because you're outvoted is throwing the baby out with the bath.
I agree that the system should allow for differences of opinion. But if a person is consistently having their moderations reversed, then at some point it becomes indicative that they are mis-moderating.
In fact, I would argue just the opposite: that when some moderators vote against the others, that it shows the system moderating itself. This is why meta-moderation is unnecessary: because it's already built, to some degree, into the system.
Actually, you could well be right. The recent problems seemed caused more because there weren't enough moderators available (or willing) to deal with the situation, rather than mis-moderation. But I have had comments of mine which I felt were mis-moderated, and it would have been nice to think there was some payback.
I believe the system I proposed is at least no worse than the meta-moderation system. Whether either system can reduce the number of people complaining to CmdrTaco that their comments have been mis-moderated is an open question.
I don't think adding extra layers of moderation is a sensible way to deal with bad moderation. I think it should be obvious from the way the complexity level is going through the roof that this is a bad idea.
Instead, I think the system should judge moderators by how often their moderations get overridden by other moderators. Specifically, a moderator should lose karma when a comment they have moderated in one direction is subsequently moderated in the opposite direction. Not a lot each time, because you don't want to allow vendettas or suppress differing opinions, but enough for the system to detect genuine abuses.
For this to work properly, there would need to be more moderation points in circulation. I don't have a problem with it if some comments get up to +10 or +15, in fact, it would help differentiate them.
Somehow I don't think CmdrTaco is gonna drop the M2 system he spent all weekend coding, but I thought it was worthwhile getting my idea out there anyway.:-)
Face it, efforts are already split. There's OSS/Linux, 4Front's proprietary product, OSS/Free, the out-dated and crippled version 4Front puts out every so often which is just "good enough" to stop significant development effort going into an alternative, there's the sound code in the Linux kernel tree which is derived from OSS/Free but has been modularised and improved by kernel hackers, and then there's ALSA, which can never get enough developers because they're all too busy working around the lossage created by 4Front.
If Red Hat bought 4Front, then instead of 4 sound systems on Linux we could have 2 and a bit. There might even be a chance for an eventual merge of the two free systems. That's an improvement by my reckoning.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm... 1024x768x32bit = 25165824 bits. Cycling through these bits is exactly equivalent to the "counting up" problem you're responding to. Since we've already established we can't count that high, there's no danger anyone is ever going to show you ever possible picture. Given the thousands of possible variations of goatse guy, this is probably a good thing.
What should make you feel small is that physicist have figured out a way to count all the possible states for a particular volume of matter (assuming an upper bound on temperature, if that makes any difference). That means the entirety of the observable universe has only a finite number of possible states.
If the unobservable universe is infinite, and if states are distributed probabilistically (and why wouldn't they be?), that means that your hypothetical world where Julius Caesar wasn't murdered actually exists, out there, somewhere, far out of reach.
It was the US Navy that got it wrong. Non-secure isn't a word. If a line is not protected from evesdropping, the correct term would be "unsecured".
So they're replacing a proprietary cartridge system with a proprietary mini-DVD system? Hoor-fucking-ray. Obviously the reasoning behind this is to make the things harder to independantly produce, so they can maintain a vice-like grip on the games, and so they'll look like data discs always do in the movies.
Oooh, and they've got a great new business model! Let me take a stab at it... they're gonna market the thing like crazy to kids, and then sell the console at below cost to harrassed parents while conveniently forgetting to mention that they're going to need a second mortgage to buy any games for it. Am I close?
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
That's been there for years. All the people getting excited over this should probably pay more attention to their own boot sequence before worrying about other people's.
I wouldn't exactly call this a bug. You shouldn't do this on any system that hasn't been specifically designed for it (and yes, that includes ones with journalling filesystems and MS-DOS). Besides which, maybe I'm just lucky, but fsck has cleaned up nicely every time I've failed to do a clean shutdown. Obviously it depends how busy the system is at the time, and the alignment of the stars, but if you're trashing your filesystem every time I can't help wondering if you're not just doing something wrong (in addition to pulling the plug in the first place, that is).
grope (GNU Rope) was gonna be a tool that does what it sounds like fur does, ie. re-order chunks of machine code in an executable to move bits of code that get used together next to each other, using profiling and what not. I got all excited about it, and then never heard of it again. Anyone out there know what happened to his project?
If they'd stuck to the prostitution business my opinion of them would be much higher :-)
The most worrying thing about the DMCA, and its biggest weakness, is that it provides legal support for any usage restriction that can be implemented in technology. The restriction doesn't even need to work well, you just need to prove it's in there.
So, to defeat the DMCA, all you need to do is to implement a copy protection mechanism that does something clearly unconstitutional. Then all you need is a friend who can afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees to circumvent your copy protection mechanism. Oh, and of course you need to be able to afford millions of dollars worth of legal fees yourself so you can keep on sueing them all the way up the court system. But you didn't really expect to be able to change the law without being rich, did you?
I hate the way they exploit the ignorance of parents, with cheap consoles and massively overpriced games, and advertising targeted at young kids. It's scuzzy, and they deserve to go down.
In conclusion, I say we let proprietary software have that first five minutes. It has to be better for something!
Now we know.
Maybe I should have read past the headline before posting... naaah.
Just wait for Odium and Itrogen!
Does anyone out there have a version of Netscape for Linux that can display a PNG without crashing? If major numbers of sites do switch to PNG, I'm gonna have to revert to an older version of Netscape unless the newer ones have fixed the bug.
Yes, I know I did this joke last year. I laughed so hard I had to do it again.
:-)
I suppose it comes by extension of the right to share anything else. If I want to let a friend live in my house rent-free, I do not expect the builder to be knocking on my door saying "sorry, you can't do that, you're threatening my livelihood". Yet software builders take their ability to dictate how their "houses" may be used for granted.
Now you know perfectly well that this isn't always an option. If it wasn't for the work of the GNU project, those of us who wanted to share our operating systems would have no legal choice at all. Even now, Microsoft is struggling to stop this choice being a viable one. Or are you suggesting those of us who don't like to be blackmailed into shrinkwrap contracts shouldn't use computers at all? That wouldn't leave us in a very good position in the 21st century.
RMS himself has made it clear that he doesn't expect free software to save the world. But software freedom is an issue important enough to him that he has decided to devote his life to it, and I think it's worthy of our attention.
Absolutely. I am not saying I think that Stallman is correct, I am saying that we should consider his arguments. Perhaps there is a moral imperative for free software.
You're missing the point here. Does being the author of a program give you a right to restrict other people's right to share it? Conventional copyright law says yes. RMS says no. You need to distance yourself somewhat from the current legal framework to see the strength of RMS' arguments. A read through the GNU website is always worthwhile. Note the emphasis on the rights of the user, not the programmer. This is what Stallman cares about. You may not agree, but you can at least take the time to understand.
Who cares? It's fun!
Believe it, baby! It's like WWF... tag team partners turned bitter enemies... locked in the cage of death! Though personally I think we should coat them in jam and have them wack at each other with foam rubber bananas.
Bruce! Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!
I can't help thinking that we should deal with little things like starvation and poverty before worrying about the MACHINES THAT ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD! OH MY GOD THEY'RE AT THE DOOR I CAN HEAR THEM THEY'RE COMING FOR ME THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE RIGHT OUTSIDE...
I am better now do not be alarmed everything is fine sit down and have a beer and watch the pretty pictures
Time for Jon Katz to write an article about how MP3s are revolutioning the criminal justice system.
This is untrue, unless you are using CGI scripts for dynamic content. Webservers that fork for each connection went out of mainstream use about 5 years ago. Apache uses a pre-forking model, meaning it has a "herd" of seperate processes each of which handles one connection at a time. Multi-threaded servers are more efficient, but the pre-forking model is optimum for stability.
While there are other webservers known faster for static content (Zeus comes to mind), I don't know where Apache stands for dynamic content. It probably depends what language you are using: mod_php4 is supposed to be very fast, and of course if you write a custom module in C you can make it as fast as it needs to be.
It should be noted that Zope can be used with several servers; Bruce Perens in fact uses it with Apache. It is not considered to be especially quick, it is the rich functionality and flexibility that people choose it for.
Philip Greenspun is rapturous in his praise of AOLServer; but then, he thinks we should be using dynamic content for everything, and I've never heard of anyone else who actually uses it (apart from AOL, obviously). Bear in mind that AOLServer is as tied to TCL as Zope is to Python.
I agree that the system should allow for differences of opinion. But if a person is consistently having their moderations reversed, then at some point it becomes indicative that they are mis-moderating.
Actually, you could well be right. The recent problems seemed caused more because there weren't enough moderators available (or willing) to deal with the situation, rather than mis-moderation. But I have had comments of mine which I felt were mis-moderated, and it would have been nice to think there was some payback.
I believe the system I proposed is at least no worse than the meta-moderation system. Whether either system can reduce the number of people complaining to CmdrTaco that their comments have been mis-moderated is an open question.
Instead, I think the system should judge moderators by how often their moderations get overridden by other moderators. Specifically, a moderator should lose karma when a comment they have moderated in one direction is subsequently moderated in the opposite direction. Not a lot each time, because you don't want to allow vendettas or suppress differing opinions, but enough for the system to detect genuine abuses.
For this to work properly, there would need to be more moderation points in circulation. I don't have a problem with it if some comments get up to +10 or +15, in fact, it would help differentiate them.
Somehow I don't think CmdrTaco is gonna drop the M2 system he spent all weekend coding, but I thought it was worthwhile getting my idea out there anyway. :-)
Face it, efforts are already split. There's OSS/Linux, 4Front's proprietary product, OSS/Free, the out-dated and crippled version 4Front puts out every so often which is just "good enough" to stop significant development effort going into an alternative, there's the sound code in the Linux kernel tree which is derived from OSS/Free but has been modularised and improved by kernel hackers, and then there's ALSA, which can never get enough developers because they're all too busy working around the lossage created by 4Front.
If Red Hat bought 4Front, then instead of 4 sound systems on Linux we could have 2 and a bit. There might even be a chance for an eventual merge of the two free systems. That's an improvement by my reckoning.