I agree with you whole-heartedly on the "wacky" comment. As other people have mentioned in this thread: expecting anyone to agree with everything another person says is silly. Yet, there are a lot of people who discount one thing a person says because they disagree with another. I've had to listen to some of them, and it drives me nuts.
It seems as though people want nice, easy-to-digest pundits who will say only things they agree with. Chances are, if someone fits this criteria, they have done so by saying nothing at all. I like to read speeches by people who generate controversy because they have actually said something. All you have to do is extract whatever part of the speech makes sense and discard the rest. With this simple technique and a little critical thinking, anyone can sift out lots of good points and interesting observations from people that you think are (as a whole) full of crap.
History is filled with small minded individuals who decide that everyone but themselves is stupid. A bunch of Americans, or Frenchman, or Russians, or whoever won't be remember for that trait alone. It's too common. Acting whiny and beligerent won't do it either; you have to kill a lot of people while doing it.
I downloaded his PDF's and I can't make heads or tails of them. I'm unfortunately 2 years too stupid in Physics to really understand what in the world he is saying. The text around the mysterious formulas seems to say that he applies classical physics to the atom. I find this odd since quantum mechanics helped alievate some of the problems with classical mechanics had with the atom. It sounds like this guy just chucked it and went backwards again. Fine, that doesn't disqualify him, but it makes me suspicious.
I cannot understand what the heck he is doing in the first one. He seems to be addressing a real issue if he is going to use classical mechanics on an atom: If we let the electron move around the atom in an orbit (or an "orbitsphere") it is experiencing centripetal acceleration. Thus, it will be radiating EM waves, lose momentum, and crash into the nucleus. [I hope I got that right.] This was the problem with the Bohr model for the atom.
So what is this stuff about:
Proof that the condition for nonradiation by a moving point charge is that its spacetime Fourier transform does not possess components synchronous with wavs traveling at the speed of light is given by Haus [1].
Unfortunately, there is no bibliography at the end of the PDF, so I can't go look up Haus[1] to find out what he is talking about. Can anyone who knows what is going on help me out here?
Um, sure, except for the fact that it would be nearly impossible. (Excuse me while I go into language bigot mode) Frankly, I think FORTRAN is ugly and hard to work with. Maybe I just didn't use it enough to grok it, but after a semester of writing programs in it, my only though was: "This is annoying in the extreme." However, people put up with FORTRAN's ugliness because it has features that make compiler optimization really fast, especially when you are doing mathematical operations on vectors and matrices. (I wish someone would explain the aliasing thing.)
An OS doesn't need these features, it needs direct memory access and code that is easier to follow than FORTRAN. Writing an SMP, threaded OS in FORTRAN would be about as easy as writing it in BASIC. Parallelization of FORTRAN != Good SMP OS Language.
Hmm, I did some poking around in the kernel source they provide, and I found their MFS (stands for Media File System) in the x86 kernel tree which looks like a hacked up version of NFS. In fact, their README describes it:
The kernel portion is simple and straightforward. It was created by cloning the kernel's MFS[sic, they mean NFS] client, locking it in small room in the East Tower, and turning Meenie Eenie loose with a sharp meat-cleaver.
It does NFS without TCP/IP (I guess that means no Ethernet in there!). I haven't found the server. They say it's in userspace, so they may not have chosen to provide it.
In the PPC kernel tree, the only new filesystem (at least for me) was bext2, a cut-and-paste version of ext2 that stores all of the data on disk in big-endian order so you don't have to cpu_to_le32()/le32_to_cpu() all of your int's. That certainly would make the filesystem incompatible with normal kernels, but it's a trivial change. Does anyone know if they even use this filesystem?
Does anyone have anymore information about their method to prevent the files from being transferred to the PC? bext2 can't be it; it's too simple a change.
Don't get offended if you don't have to. He may or may not be passing a moral judgement, we don't know. However, in the eyes of the Judeo-Christian religions, sex with someone other than your spouse is "immoral". (The quotes are to remind you that this is an opinion being discussed in an abstract way and not for its actual validity.) Last time I checked, people who only have sex with their spouse (assuming their spouse does the same) will not contract AIDS through sexual intercourse. Thus, their chances of contracting AIDS are much lower. If "moral" (again observe the quotes) people are less likely to contract AIDS than "immoral" people, then we would also expect a random sample of the AIDS infected population to be most likely an "immoral" (please, please see the quotes) person.
There, I think I made the guy's original point. "Immoral" in this context refers to the category that a particular religious group considers to be equivalent to the abstract notion of immorality. Whether or not they're right is another matter which I don't particularly care about.
Where in the world did they come up with that figure? Let's do a little math here. First some assumptions:
The average CD costs $18. [Your store may vary.]
The average CD contains 10 songs. [Notice that I am erring on the side of the RIAA]
The worth of a song is computed by prorating the worth of the CD. Thus, each song is worth 1/10 of the cost of a CD.
Lawsuit damages have some connection to value. [Stop snickering!]
That means that one song pirated on Napster has a value of $1.80. So, in order to have caused $100,000 dollars of damage to the RIAA, the song would have had to be pirated approximately 56,000 times! Have 56,000 people even downloaded Napster? If so, does anyone actually believe that nearly all of them pirated the same song?
Of course, the answer is that assumption 4 is wrong. We all know that the legal system is like the lottery. Once you can prove someone has "screwed you over," it is your moral duty to extract as much money from them as possible. The amount need not have any relation to reality.
Actually, this is a little different. The RIAA isn't doing this to get money; they're doing it to put Napster so far into debt that they'll have to sell their relative's organs to get out. At the same time, they will manage to scare the pants off of anyone else who might cross their path.
I'm confused. How exactly is this possible? I thought that the meltdown of reactor 4 scattered radioactive material all over the area. I know they buldozed the topsoil over a huge area into concrete pits, but there's no way that they could have cleaned up everything in the area. Has the radiation dropped below "harmful" levels, or has the Ukraine decided to adopt the old Soviet view of "worker safety"?
Hmm.. If nothing else, having a giant concrete enclosed reactor nearby would be bad for morale.
M: Hey Pyotr, what's Ivan doing?
P: Oh, he's just roasting some marshmallows on reactor 4.
Based upon the "free, as in beer" comment in the article, I'm guessing that the SourceForge software (scripts and friends) are not available for public consumption. However, I was unable to confirm this after several minutes of perusing. Does anyone know for sure that the source is not available? If so, will it ever be available?
I'm really confused about this entire fiasco. As far as I understand things:
CSS is an multi-key encryption/decryption algorithm that allows multiple parties to decode the same "message" (i.e. movie) with their own unique key.
The encryption license holders have a cache of some 400 (I think) of these keys and give a different one to each vendor that licenses the technology.
The weakness with the system is that many of the decryption keys are mathematically linked so that finding one means you can easily extract others.
Xing caused the problem by not encrypting their decrypt key and just hard-coded the key into their application.
Now comes my confusion: What is the purpose of this encryption? Is it to prevent piracy or to prevent unlicensed vendors from writing DVD player software?
The only thing that makes sense from the above information is the latter. This scheme could never prevent piracy because anyone could copy the data and play it on another licensed player. However, this scheme does (perhaps "did" is a better word) seem to be marginally effective at preventing other software vendors from writing DVD movie applications without proper license.
Okay, if I am correct about the previous conclusion, then I have one last question: What do the DVD technology owners gain by limiting the player software? Do they get royalties/licensing fees?
I really don't understand why this situation even needed to become an issue.
If you read the article, you find the culprit isn't HTML, it's ActiveX. The HTML part is just the way that ActiveX is initiated.
This would scare me if I used IE5.0 because I don't like the idea of untrusted websites being able to run native code on my computer. At least with Java and Javascript they run in a sandbox of sorts (although one of the two can core dump Netscape). ActiveX needs to die as an interesting, but flawed experiment.
While I think Roblimo's article is interesting, I don't buy into his idea that people making big advancements in computer science would also be making equivalently amazing advancements in other fields.
Computer science is only 60 years old, making it the youngest of the engineering disciplines. Like a young child, its rate of learning and growth is absolutely unbelievable. However, as the basic infrastructure is layed down, the rate of growth slows. That's because the early advancements are simpler (though no less important) than the later, more complicated advancements. Expecting that other, more mature, industries can experience the same kind of growth as computer science is not realistic.
Another thing to consider is the flexibility of the medium. Maybe it's just my bias, but the aspect of computers that attract me (and many of my computer geek friends) most is the lack of limitations with computers. Especially given the increase in computer hardware (caused by the growth of modern electronics, a field who history has gone hand-in-hand with computer science), more and more the limits on software are human imagination. I just can't see mechanical engineering or agriculture experiencing the same kind of boom because doing unique and amazing things is so much harder to do in the real, physical world. However, digital castles can be suspended quite easily in virtual air.
I think the "Information Revolution" (as much as I am sick of that term, it is the most accurate) happened because of the special nature of information, not because a bunch of smart people happened to magically appear on Earth in the latter half of the decade. The smart people have always been around.
Wow. Their list of countries is inclusive, not exclusive, so if you aren't on their approved list, you can't download the code.
Take a look at this list. Much of South America, nearly all of Africa (South Africa excepted), most of Southeast Asia and just about all of the Russian republics are not allowed to download the software. Isn't this just a little odd? Does anyone know how a country gets on Sun's "Buddy List"?
He's one of the guys at Trinity College who worked on this thing. His page is here. He mentions Lego Robotics at the bottom, but he has no link to anything. Maybe something will appear there eventually.
I'm not a theologian (IANAT), but I don't know of many churches (at least those of Christian descent) that claim that naturally occuring bacteria can sin either. Usually that ability hinges on whether the creatures understands good and evil. I really doubt bacteria fit that criteria.
I also have no recollection of anyone making claims about bacteria souls.
Sun Chief Executive ``Scott McNealy is smarter than a fox and can make all of this sound wonderful, but in fact very few corporations are going to buy this stuff,'' said David Wu, a San Francisco-based analyst for brokerage firm ABN AMRO Securities. ``Sun is a server company, period. If they want to give away software and make some cheap computers, so be it. But that doesn't change their (main) business.''
That guy hit it on the nose. Notice how all of Sun's recent announcements are server-centric? StarPortal needs a server to run, and these "Souped-up monitors" need a server to run as well. Guess what kind of server?
I'm actually curious to see what the resource requirements are to support a bunch of these things deployed in a company. One box per 5 clients? 25 clients? 50 clients? Is the server end a web server, or is it custom software for Solaris, etc...
It will be interesting to see how Sun balances forcing people to buy servers (which they want to do) with integrating this technology with a business's existing servers.
I am not sure I understand your issue with the GPL. Are you saying:
If someone modifies a GPL'ed program, they must release the modifications. or
If someone modifies a GPL'ed program and gives/sells/trades/whatever the program with someone else, they must release the modifications to that person.
The first is false, but the second is true. I can modify GPL'ed code for internal use only, and tell no one about it. If, however, I let someone else have the program (compensation is irrelevant), I must give them the source code with it. I also cannot limit what they do with the source code.
How does this differ from the BSD license? Can a person distribute binaries that include BSD code without distributing the source? Can they make their modifications under a different license than the rest of the program?
I guess I am a little confused about the license differences.
I've been curious what the graduate program is like at UNC. How is it? What do they specialize in? I've been looking to see what they have there, but I would like to hear the opinion of someone already there.
Okay, I'm not up on my Vague-Tech-Reporting lingo. Does this mean we'll be seeing a CPU that runs Java bytecodes natively? If that is case, kudos to Sun! I'm really impressed with Java as a language, and I would like to see Java programs run at something resembling native binary speeds.
Of course, if this isn't what Sun is proposing, could someone tell me what this means?
Accountability isn't a bad thing, as long the people you are accountable to aren't abusing their power to abuse you.:)
Given the general legal trend, I don't think people want to be accountable to corporations and their legal teams. It's hard to know when an offhand comment ("Dude, Oracle 8 sucks big time...") will come back and bite you.
That leaves Slashdot in a unique position: Moderation occurs, but Rob doesn't do it. The users do it. Is there a way a corporation could sue all of the Slashdot moderators? (I suspect no, but one can't be sure these days.)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems as though people want nice, easy-to-digest pundits who will say only things they agree with. Chances are, if someone fits this criteria, they have done so by saying nothing at all. I like to read speeches by people who generate controversy because they have actually said something. All you have to do is extract whatever part of the speech makes sense and discard the rest. With this simple technique and a little critical thinking, anyone can sift out lots of good points and interesting observations from people that you think are (as a whole) full of crap.
(defvar prefix '("Pent" "It" "Max" "Ath" "Cort" "Trit"))
(defvar suffix '("ium" "alon" "ex" "anium" "oricon" "agon" "on" "eres" obos" "ymede" "itan" "erion"))
(defvar tag '("II" "III" "IV" "Pro" "MMX" "Deluxe"))
(defun random-element (list)
(nth (length list) list))
(defun generate-processor ()
(concatenate 'string
(random-element prefix) (random-element suffix) " " (random-element tag)))
Hmm.. Perhaps we need a new function in Emacs: M-x intel-chip
History is filled with small minded individuals who decide that everyone but themselves is stupid. A bunch of Americans, or Frenchman, or Russians, or whoever won't be remember for that trait alone. It's too common. Acting whiny and beligerent won't do it either; you have to kill a lot of people while doing it.
I cannot understand what the heck he is doing in the first one. He seems to be addressing a real issue if he is going to use classical mechanics on an atom: If we let the electron move around the atom in an orbit (or an "orbitsphere") it is experiencing centripetal acceleration. Thus, it will be radiating EM waves, lose momentum, and crash into the nucleus. [I hope I got that right.] This was the problem with the Bohr model for the atom.
So what is this stuff about:
Unfortunately, there is no bibliography at the end of the PDF, so I can't go look up Haus[1] to find out what he is talking about. Can anyone who knows what is going on help me out here?Do you have any references for any of this information? I would certainly like to read more about this.
An OS doesn't need these features, it needs direct memory access and code that is easier to follow than FORTRAN. Writing an SMP, threaded OS in FORTRAN would be about as easy as writing it in BASIC. Parallelization of FORTRAN != Good SMP OS Language.
In the PPC kernel tree, the only new filesystem (at least for me) was bext2, a cut-and-paste version of ext2 that stores all of the data on disk in big-endian order so you don't have to cpu_to_le32()/le32_to_cpu() all of your int's. That certainly would make the filesystem incompatible with normal kernels, but it's a trivial change. Does anyone know if they even use this filesystem?
Does anyone have anymore information about their method to prevent the files from being transferred to the PC? bext2 can't be it; it's too simple a change.
There, I think I made the guy's original point. "Immoral" in this context refers to the category that a particular religious group considers to be equivalent to the abstract notion of immorality. Whether or not they're right is another matter which I don't particularly care about.
- The average CD costs $18. [Your store may vary.]
- The average CD contains 10 songs. [Notice that I am erring on the side of the RIAA]
- The worth of a song is computed by prorating the worth of the CD. Thus, each song is worth 1/10 of the cost of a CD.
- Lawsuit damages have some connection to value. [Stop snickering!]
That means that one song pirated on Napster has a value of $1.80. So, in order to have caused $100,000 dollars of damage to the RIAA, the song would have had to be pirated approximately 56,000 times! Have 56,000 people even downloaded Napster? If so, does anyone actually believe that nearly all of them pirated the same song?Of course, the answer is that assumption 4 is wrong. We all know that the legal system is like the lottery. Once you can prove someone has "screwed you over," it is your moral duty to extract as much money from them as possible. The amount need not have any relation to reality.
Actually, this is a little different. The RIAA isn't doing this to get money; they're doing it to put Napster so far into debt that they'll have to sell their relative's organs to get out. At the same time, they will manage to scare the pants off of anyone else who might cross their path.
Hmm.. If nothing else, having a giant concrete enclosed reactor nearby would be bad for morale.
M: Hey Pyotr, what's Ivan doing?
P: Oh, he's just roasting some marshmallows on reactor 4.
Based upon the "free, as in beer" comment in the article, I'm guessing that the SourceForge software (scripts and friends) are not available for public consumption. However, I was unable to confirm this after several minutes of perusing. Does anyone know for sure that the source is not available? If so, will it ever be available?
CSS is an multi-key encryption/decryption algorithm that allows multiple parties to decode the same "message" (i.e. movie) with their own unique key.
The encryption license holders have a cache of some 400 (I think) of these keys and give a different one to each vendor that licenses the technology.
The weakness with the system is that many of the decryption keys are mathematically linked so that finding one means you can easily extract others.
Xing caused the problem by not encrypting their decrypt key and just hard-coded the key into their application.
Now comes my confusion:
What is the purpose of this encryption? Is it to prevent piracy or to prevent unlicensed vendors from writing DVD player software?
The only thing that makes sense from the above information is the latter. This scheme could never prevent piracy because anyone could copy the data and play it on another licensed player. However, this scheme does (perhaps "did" is a better word) seem to be marginally effective at preventing other software vendors from writing DVD movie applications without proper license.
Okay, if I am correct about the previous conclusion, then I have one last question: What do the DVD technology owners gain by limiting the player software? Do they get royalties/licensing fees?
I really don't understand why this situation even needed to become an issue.
This would scare me if I used IE5.0 because I don't like the idea of untrusted websites being able to run native code on my computer. At least with Java and Javascript they run in a sandbox of sorts (although one of the two can core dump Netscape). ActiveX needs to die as an interesting, but flawed experiment.
I'm justed amazed that the data movers are coming up with new techniques as fast as the data producers can come up with stuff to send.
Of course, I'm still waiting for advances like this to filter down to us plebians who just want symmetric 10 Mbit cable modem access. :)
Computer science is only 60 years old, making it the youngest of the engineering disciplines. Like a young child, its rate of learning and growth is absolutely unbelievable. However, as the basic infrastructure is layed down, the rate of growth slows. That's because the early advancements are simpler (though no less important) than the later, more complicated advancements. Expecting that other, more mature, industries can experience the same kind of growth as computer science is not realistic.
Another thing to consider is the flexibility of the medium. Maybe it's just my bias, but the aspect of computers that attract me (and many of my computer geek friends) most is the lack of limitations with computers. Especially given the increase in computer hardware (caused by the growth of modern electronics, a field who history has gone hand-in-hand with computer science), more and more the limits on software are human imagination. I just can't see mechanical engineering or agriculture experiencing the same kind of boom because doing unique and amazing things is so much harder to do in the real, physical world. However, digital castles can be suspended quite easily in virtual air.
I think the "Information Revolution" (as much as I am sick of that term, it is the most accurate) happened because of the special nature of information, not because a bunch of smart people happened to magically appear on Earth in the latter half of the decade. The smart people have always been around.
Take a look at this list. Much of South America, nearly all of Africa (South Africa excepted), most of Southeast Asia and just about all of the Russian republics are not allowed to download the software. Isn't this just a little odd? Does anyone know how a country gets on Sun's "Buddy List"?
[BTW, I'm on the software team for the ASUSat1 project.]
He's one of the guys at Trinity College who worked on this thing. His page is here. He mentions Lego Robotics at the bottom, but he has no link to anything. Maybe something will appear there eventually.
I also have no recollection of anyone making claims about bacteria souls.
I'm actually curious to see what the resource requirements are to support a bunch of these things deployed in a company. One box per 5 clients? 25 clients? 50 clients? Is the server end a web server, or is it custom software for Solaris, etc...
It will be interesting to see how Sun balances forcing people to buy servers (which they want to do) with integrating this technology with a business's existing servers.
- If someone modifies a GPL'ed program, they must release the modifications.
- If someone modifies a GPL'ed program and gives/sells/trades/whatever the program with someone else, they must release the modifications to that person.
The first is false, but the second is true. I can modify GPL'ed code for internal use only, and tell no one about it. If, however, I let someone else have the program (compensation is irrelevant), I must give them the source code with it. I also cannot limit what they do with the source code.or
How does this differ from the BSD license? Can a person distribute binaries that include BSD code without distributing the source? Can they make their modifications under a different license than the rest of the program?
I guess I am a little confused about the license differences.
I've been curious what the graduate program is like at UNC. How is it? What do they specialize in? I've been looking to see what they have there, but I would like to hear the opinion of someone already there.
Of course, if this isn't what Sun is proposing, could someone tell me what this means?
Given the general legal trend, I don't think people want to be accountable to corporations and their legal teams. It's hard to know when an offhand comment ("Dude, Oracle 8 sucks big time...") will come back and bite you.
That leaves Slashdot in a unique position: Moderation occurs, but Rob doesn't do it. The users do it. Is there a way a corporation could sue all of the Slashdot moderators? (I suspect no, but one can't be sure these days.)