If the closing of LWN was the worst thing that had happened to me so far this year, I'd certainly agree with you. But in addition to a few major things that have gone wrong this year, a whole lot of smaller things have. So this is one more contribution to the general suckiness of the year.
in the last 40 years there had been wars, famine and disease that killed and maimed hundreds of millions of people worldwide ;
It's not that I don't sympathize with the people who were affected by such things, but I was talking about how the year has been for people I associate with. I can only carry "think globally" so far; when things are terrible locally it what's the point in worrying about other people you don't know who have it worse? Sure, any year that you get maimed or killed is obviously seriously f$#@ed up, but so far that hasn't happened to me. On the other hand, several family members and friends have died this year.
2002 wasn't very bright so far, but it also wasn't the gloomiest.
Well, I'm glad it's not for you, but it is for me and several of my friends, which is why I said that.
I'm trying to stay optimistic about things looking up in the future, but denying that things are terrible now won't particularly help.
I certainly hope 2003 is better, because 2002
has been the worst year out of the nearly 40 I've
seen. Hardly a week has gone by without some bad
news like this.
Anyhow, I'm very sorry to see LWN go. They provided
a great resource, and I was glad to donated money to
them. It's too bad the donations weren't sufficient, but I guess it's not surprising.
Wouldn't a "none of the above" choice be just as good? It wouldn't necessarily have to be binding in any way (in other words, "none of the above" wouldn't win, even if it got the most votes), but it would be counted and reported.
Otherwise, you can't tell whether spoiled votes are a protest or a mistake, except perhaps by assuming that if there are a large number of them, it's probably a protest.
(Personally I'm even in favor of letting "none of the above" win, in which case all the candidates are disqualified from the office and a new election is scheduled.)
Where the government uses a software based machine for recording votes, there must be some extreme means to confirm that it does this honestly - perhaps by using open source code and MD5 verification of the binary in memory before and after voting to prove that the proper code is being run.
As an example, look at the way the Nevada Gaming Commission audits the electronic gambling machines. They audit the software, then go around to each machine and actually compare the contents of the EPROMs against known-good copies that they retain.
There are still some possible attacks, and at least one has actually occurred in practice, but such a system is a good start.
But it certainly requires machines that don't have their warranty or support contract voided just because the cover is opened.
I find it totally unacceptable that a critical component of the election system be secret. If the equipment vendor had patents covering their machine, that would be reasonable, but to keep details of it as a trade secret such that the public cannot have any reasonable assurance that the machines are reliable and fair is not acceptable.
I'm not a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, but
the 2000 presidential election showed that it is important to all US cititzens that the election systems work properly nationwide.
I have some proposals for how we as citizens can attack this problem:
File a suit against Palm County. Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, and Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., to try to get them to divulge sufficient information that the public can reasonably assess the reliability, integrity, and fairness of the voting machines. Possibly try to get an injunction against use of these machines in federal elections until this happens.
Collect money to purchase a unit of the machine in question, which reportedly costs $3500, reverse-engineer it, and report our findings. I have a lot of experience with reverse-engineering of embedded systems, but can't afford to buy the machine myself. Is anyone else interested? I am willing to volunteer some money (perhaps $100) and a bunch of my time to the reverse-engineering effort. (I can't volunteer more money because my consulting work is pretty slow right now.)
Form a non-profit corporation to pursue some of these goals. I haven't formed a non-profit before, so I'm not sure how quickly this can be done. Perhaps someone with experience in this area can offer advice. I suggest the name "Citizens for Election Accountability", and will put some material up on www.c4ea.org within the next few days.
Nutting Associates was the company for which Nolan designed Computer Space, but it was not "Nolan Bushnell's company". Atari was Nolan Bushnell's company, at least until he sold it to Warner.
But none of that changes the fact that neither Atari nor Magnavox started the video game business.
While many thought Atari started the video game business, that was not correct, it was Magnavox and its Odyssey console designed by Ralph Baer that would be the first.
Wrong for two reasons:
The Odyssey came after Atari's Pong
The video game business was started in 1971 by Nutting Associates, with the game "Computer Space"
If you burn the flag here, I think you should be deported.
On what basis?
It directly means you hate our nation and our beliefs.
Perhaps. Or it might mean that you hate our government, which is quite possible to do without hating our country; the country encompasses much more than the government. Or it might mean something else entirely. The flag is merely a symbols, and it may mean different things to different people. As Mark Twain said, "To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--this is loyalty to unreason, it is pure animal."
We live in a free society. With that, you are free to leave.
You are also free to stay, even if your beliefs and actions are unpopular.
This is the US and the Pledge is supporting our country.
How does it support our country? Will having children recite the pledge keep someone here from going hungry, or put a roof over their head? Will it change the outcome of a battle, or prevent foreign terrorists from crashing airliners into skyscrapers?
Therefore, by saying the word god by no means requires the belief in Jesus, or any other specific religion.
The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It doesn't say "specific religion." Having the words "under God" or even "under god" in the pledge certainly is "respecting an establishment of religion," even if it isn't a specific religion.
So, "one nation, under a supreme value" is not so offensive, but god is easier to say.
The core issue isn't offensiveness. But "under a supreme value" is just as offensive to me as "under God," since I do NOT believe in a "supreme value".
If Congress wants to fix this problem, they should simply remove the words "under God," which were only added as part of McCarthy's Communist scare anyhow.
I'm using the DVR-A03 with Red Hat Linux 7.3. It works fine for burning DVD-ROMs, but as others have pointed out, there appears to be no available Linux software for mastering DVD-Video. I expect that a DVR-A04 should work fine.
Red Hat 7.3 includes a package called "dvdrecord", which is a fork of cdrecord that has been patched for use with DVD-R drives. (The official cdrecord program does not include DVD-R support because the author sells that as a commercial product.) If you're not using RH 7.3, you can build dvdrecord yourself from source:
dvdrtools.
Thus far I'm just using them as if they were higher-capacity CD-ROMs, using the ISO 9660 file system. It seems to work fine. There is some early UDF support in mkisofs, but I haven't yet tried it.
Re:If you can afford to wait...(somewhat offtopic)
on
Time to Purchase a DVD-R?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Progressive is not "twice as good" as interlaced.
Keep in mind you're still drawing from interlaced source material -
Progressive is much better for material originally sourced from film. I'm not going to go out on a limb and claim it's twice as good, but it's definitely good.
Why? Because film is progressive, not interlaced. When they convert the film to NTSC video (using equipment/process called telecine), they have to convert it to
interlaced format, using a process called 3:2 pulldown. This splits each frame into two
interlaced fields, which raises the effective rate from 24 Hz to 48 Hz. Then they duplicate some of the fields, to get from 48 Hz to the video rate of 60 Hz. Actually the NTSC rate is 59.94 Hz, but usually they ignore that detail, and the running
time of the resulting video is off by 0.1%.
This results in a big difference compared to the output of video cameras. With a video camera, the two interlaced fields that make up a frame are not captured simultaneously. Instead, the camera captures a separate field every 1/60 of a second. Thus if the camera or the scene is moving, you will not be able to merge two consecutive fields into a single coherent frame. When the video is
played back at normal speed, this is not a problem; in fact, it makes the video "smoother".
However, if you try to display a still frame, you will see the image oscillate between the two time-independent fields at 30 Hz, which is incredibly annoying.
With telecine output, however, consecutive fields come from the same film frame. And the MPEG-2 video stream takes advantage of this by avoiding encoding the duplicate fields that were inserted by the 3:2 pulldown. So the DVD actually contains 48 fields per second, with flags that tell the player which fields to duplicate for the pulldown.
A progressive-scan DVD player simply uses those flags to reconstruct the original non-interlaced frames.
For DVDs from a video source, a progressive player does have to do some "magic" in order to get reasonable deinterlaced output. This is not an exact science; different players use various techniques to do this, so the resulting quality can vary quite a bit.
Note that for PAL and SECAM video, the field rate is 50 Hz, so 3:2 pulldown is not used. But it is still possible for the DVD player to do perfect deinterlace of DVDs mastered from film.
Besides, have you seen the price of modern progressive DVD players?
Light bulbs do NOT emit microwave radiation
as "part of their utility," because the radiated
microwave energy has nothing to do with their
intended purpose, which is producing light. The
fact that they use microwave energy internally
to produce the light is a means, not an
end.
In your other examples, emitted microwave radiation is the desired function, rather
than incidental.
Worst case, if the building needs heating and
the light bulb isn't providing it, you run an
electric heater, which will consume no more power
than that saved by the new lightbulb to produce the
same amount of heat as would have been produced
by the old lightbulb.
However, by separating the functions you now have
the flexibility to provide heat from other sources
that may be more economical, such as natural gas,
or (in some cases) a heat pump.
And if you ever need cooling, the new lightbulb
obviously wins, since you don't have to
simultaneously pay to both heat the room with the light bulb and cool it with an air conditioner.
I doubt that there are many buildings that need
heating when there is cold weather, and for which
the lighting is sufficient to provide that heating
year-round. So most buildings that ever need
heating already have some other provision for it,
and don't need it from the lighting.
I wrote a fairly obscure little piece of Free
Software (GPL'd) and put it on my web site along
with a note that I'm willing to sell commercial
licenses to anyone that doesn't want to use it
under the GPL terms. I wasn't actually expecting
any income from it, and I made NO effort to
seek out customers, but customers showed up
anyhow and paid me several thousand dollars.
That may not be a huge amount of money, but it's
pretty darn good considering that aside from
writing the software, I didn't spend any time
trying to bring in money.
I can only surmise
that if someone wrote Free Software with a
more broad appeal, and invested some effort
into attempting to make money on it, they should
be able to do much better than I have. In fact,
there's at least one existence proof.
Proctor and Bergman (of Firesign Theatre fame) on their 1975 album "TV or Not TV", had characters using the phrase "free, just a dollar". Evidently there's been 20:1 inflation since then.
OT: If you're a FST fan and you haven't heard this album, start looking. It's fantastic!
Since I don't expect Ricochet to recover, I hope public-access 802.11b networks like this appear in the San Jose and Denver areas. And it would be really nice if the various public 802.11b networks got together and implemented roaming for their customers.
A 5.2 *is* enough to cause serious damage to buildings and a good chance of death, if you're in an area with a building code that doesn't require construction that is earthquake-safe.
Fortunately in California the building code does require this, so a 5.2 isn't likely to be a problem unless you happen to be very close or at a point where the P-waves and S-waves reinforce.
The ADP Onsite was a slightly modified DECSYSTEM-2020, which is a PDP-10 using the KS10 CPU. I may be getting one of these in about a week.
Hopefully it won't fall off a truck on the way across country.
I was unloading an AS/400 system from a truck once.
The CPU took up only a portion of the rack near the
middle, so the rest of the rack was filled up with
about ten 9332 drives, which are big and heavy. IBM says you're only supposed to install about six of
them in a rack. I lowered it down on the lift gate, but it was still at a slight angle, and the rack was topheavy, so it fell over.
It mangled the rack and broke the front panels of all the drives. I didn't ever try to power it up.
I'd gotten it free, but didn't get any software with it. It turns out that the software licenses for the old CISC-based AS/400 systems were non-transferrable, and if the system is powered off for more than a few days, it will demand a special password that you have to get from IBM.
Of course they want big bucks for a new license
for OS/400.
They did this to destroy the resale market. I didn't know that when I got it. Live and learn.
They've changed that policy on the new PowerPC-based AS/400 systems, amazingly enough. Now the software license can be transferred with the machine.
I wouldn't call getting into the service menu of the Apex AD600A an amazing feat
Nor would I. But that's not what I'm talking about.
Despite using a very non-mainstream microprocessor (a modified MIPS-X, which is NOT the commercial MIPS, but rather the predecessor developed at Stanford), and the almost complete lack of publicly available documentation and development tools for that processor, people have managed to disassemble the code and make some serious modifications and enhancements.
They've added region switching and disabled Macrovision in later firmware releases that do NOT contain the secret menu. They've also disabled the UOP bits, which are those horrible bits on the disc that prevent you from fast-forwarding through FBI warnings, studio logos, trailers, etc. And they've even added an on-screen machine code debugger.
That's the amazing hacking I was referring to. Pressing a few buttons on a remote to get into a secret menu is definitely NOT a clever hack.
The article suggests that service providers detect this by querying the modem at the customer end using SNMP. If that's true, a better[*] hack would be to modify the firmware to uncap the bandwidth regardless of what the MIB variables say. In other words, let it report back via SNMP exactly what the service provider sets the cap to, but have the modem disregard that variable.
People have done much more amazing hacks than that on DVD players, such as the Apex AD600A, despite the use of a non-standard microprocessor. Hacking the firmware of a cable modem should be quite simple by comparison.
That's the sort of reverse-engineering I used to do quite often, but now I get little opportunity due to the DMCA. It doesn't seem like service provider or cable modem vendor can use the DMCA to ban reverse-engineering of the cable modem, since the features in question aren't involved in copy protection. But the trend seems to be to sue first and try to justify it later.
Eric
[*] Better in the sense of being less detectable. I'm not suggesting that doing this is legal or ethical.
nVidia
wants to open source their drivers. The reason I got for them being binary only was that they licensed the AGP code from a third party which is unwilling to open their code.
If that was really true (which I doubt), nVidia could release the sources with the third-party code stripped, and the community would write a replacement for that part.
The reality appears to be that they think by releasing sources or programming specs, they'll somehow make it easy for a competitor to clone their chips. But as any ASIC engineer knows, that's not true. If it were, everyone would be making Pentium IV clones, since the specs for that are published. The reality is that designing a chip with tens of millions of transistors is a very large amount of work, even with the programming (register) specs.
nVidia did release some source code at one point,
but it had been run through the C preprocessor, so it was effectively obfuscated.
I used to buy nVidia-based cards, but now I
prefer ATI or Matrox. They may not be as
high performance, but to me the support is
much more important. Anyhow, I have yet to
find anything I do for which the performance
of the ATI or Matrox cards is inadequate.
I don't have any need for frame rates above 72 Hz.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to stay optimistic about things looking up in the future, but denying that things are terrible now won't particularly help.
Anyhow, I'm very sorry to see LWN go. They provided a great resource, and I was glad to donated money to them. It's too bad the donations weren't sufficient, but I guess it's not surprising.
Sigh.
"Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!"
-- Kodos and Kang
But yes, if they had stolen anything (which I very much doubt), it would be wrong regardless of from whom they had stolen it.
Otherwise, you can't tell whether spoiled votes are a protest or a mistake, except perhaps by assuming that if there are a large number of them, it's probably a protest.
(Personally I'm even in favor of letting "none of the above" win, in which case all the candidates are disqualified from the office and a new election is scheduled.)
There are still some possible attacks, and at least one has actually occurred in practice, but such a system is a good start.
But it certainly requires machines that don't have their warranty or support contract voided just because the cover is opened.
I'm not a resident of Palm Beach, Florida, but the 2000 presidential election showed that it is important to all US cititzens that the election systems work properly nationwide.
I have some proposals for how we as citizens can attack this problem:
Nutting wasn't as successful as Magnavox, but that's not at issue here.
But none of that changes the fact that neither Atari nor Magnavox started the video game business.
If Congress wants to fix this problem, they should simply remove the words "under God," which were only added as part of McCarthy's Communist scare anyhow.
Red Hat 7.3 includes a package called "dvdrecord", which is a fork of cdrecord that has been patched for use with DVD-R drives. (The official cdrecord program does not include DVD-R support because the author sells that as a commercial product.) If you're not using RH 7.3, you can build dvdrecord yourself from source: dvdrtools.
Thus far I'm just using them as if they were higher-capacity CD-ROMs, using the ISO 9660 file system. It seems to work fine. There is some early UDF support in mkisofs, but I haven't yet tried it.
Why? Because film is progressive, not interlaced. When they convert the film to NTSC video (using equipment/process called telecine), they have to convert it to interlaced format, using a process called 3:2 pulldown. This splits each frame into two interlaced fields, which raises the effective rate from 24 Hz to 48 Hz. Then they duplicate some of the fields, to get from 48 Hz to the video rate of 60 Hz. Actually the NTSC rate is 59.94 Hz, but usually they ignore that detail, and the running time of the resulting video is off by 0.1%.
This results in a big difference compared to the output of video cameras. With a video camera, the two interlaced fields that make up a frame are not captured simultaneously. Instead, the camera captures a separate field every 1/60 of a second. Thus if the camera or the scene is moving, you will not be able to merge two consecutive fields into a single coherent frame. When the video is played back at normal speed, this is not a problem; in fact, it makes the video "smoother". However, if you try to display a still frame, you will see the image oscillate between the two time-independent fields at 30 Hz, which is incredibly annoying.
With telecine output, however, consecutive fields come from the same film frame. And the MPEG-2 video stream takes advantage of this by avoiding encoding the duplicate fields that were inserted by the 3:2 pulldown. So the DVD actually contains 48 fields per second, with flags that tell the player which fields to duplicate for the pulldown. A progressive-scan DVD player simply uses those flags to reconstruct the original non-interlaced frames.
For DVDs from a video source, a progressive player does have to do some "magic" in order to get reasonable deinterlaced output. This is not an exact science; different players use various techniques to do this, so the resulting quality can vary quite a bit.
Note that for PAL and SECAM video, the field rate is 50 Hz, so 3:2 pulldown is not used. But it is still possible for the DVD player to do perfect deinterlace of DVDs mastered from film.
Some are quite inexpensive.I don't need a license to own a gun, either. I own several, and have no license.
Are you sure? Wasn't that instituted for motor vehicles before it was for guns?
In your other examples, emitted microwave radiation is the desired function, rather than incidental.
However, by separating the functions you now have the flexibility to provide heat from other sources that may be more economical, such as natural gas, or (in some cases) a heat pump.
And if you ever need cooling, the new lightbulb obviously wins, since you don't have to simultaneously pay to both heat the room with the light bulb and cool it with an air conditioner.
I doubt that there are many buildings that need heating when there is cold weather, and for which the lighting is sufficient to provide that heating year-round. So most buildings that ever need heating already have some other provision for it, and don't need it from the lighting.
That may not be a huge amount of money, but it's pretty darn good considering that aside from writing the software, I didn't spend any time trying to bring in money.
I can only surmise that if someone wrote Free Software with a more broad appeal, and invested some effort into attempting to make money on it, they should be able to do much better than I have. In fact, there's at least one existence proof.
OT: If you're a FST fan and you haven't heard this album, start looking. It's fantastic!
Since I don't expect Ricochet to recover, I hope public-access 802.11b networks like this appear in the San Jose and Denver areas. And it would be really nice if the various public 802.11b networks got together and implemented roaming for their customers.
Fortunately in California the building code does require this, so a 5.2 isn't likely to be a problem unless you happen to be very close or at a point where the P-waves and S-waves reinforce.
I was unloading an AS/400 system from a truck once. The CPU took up only a portion of the rack near the middle, so the rest of the rack was filled up with about ten 9332 drives, which are big and heavy. IBM says you're only supposed to install about six of them in a rack. I lowered it down on the lift gate, but it was still at a slight angle, and the rack was topheavy, so it fell over.
It mangled the rack and broke the front panels of all the drives. I didn't ever try to power it up.
I'd gotten it free, but didn't get any software with it. It turns out that the software licenses for the old CISC-based AS/400 systems were non-transferrable, and if the system is powered off for more than a few days, it will demand a special password that you have to get from IBM. Of course they want big bucks for a new license for OS/400. They did this to destroy the resale market. I didn't know that when I got it. Live and learn.
They've changed that policy on the new PowerPC-based AS/400 systems, amazingly enough. Now the software license can be transferred with the machine.
Despite using a very non-mainstream microprocessor (a modified MIPS-X, which is NOT the commercial MIPS, but rather the predecessor developed at Stanford), and the almost complete lack of publicly available documentation and development tools for that processor, people have managed to disassemble the code and make some serious modifications and enhancements.
They've added region switching and disabled Macrovision in later firmware releases that do NOT contain the secret menu. They've also disabled the UOP bits, which are those horrible bits on the disc that prevent you from fast-forwarding through FBI warnings, studio logos, trailers, etc. And they've even added an on-screen machine code debugger.
That's the amazing hacking I was referring to. Pressing a few buttons on a remote to get into a secret menu is definitely NOT a clever hack.
People have done much more amazing hacks than that on DVD players, such as the Apex AD600A, despite the use of a non-standard microprocessor. Hacking the firmware of a cable modem should be quite simple by comparison.
That's the sort of reverse-engineering I used to do quite often, but now I get little opportunity due to the DMCA. It doesn't seem like service provider or cable modem vendor can use the DMCA to ban reverse-engineering of the cable modem, since the features in question aren't involved in copy protection. But the trend seems to be to sue first and try to justify it later.
Eric
[*] Better in the sense of being less detectable. I'm not suggesting that doing this is legal or ethical.
The reality appears to be that they think by releasing sources or programming specs, they'll somehow make it easy for a competitor to clone their chips. But as any ASIC engineer knows, that's not true. If it were, everyone would be making Pentium IV clones, since the specs for that are published. The reality is that designing a chip with tens of millions of transistors is a very large amount of work, even with the programming (register) specs.
nVidia did release some source code at one point, but it had been run through the C preprocessor, so it was effectively obfuscated.
I used to buy nVidia-based cards, but now I prefer ATI or Matrox. They may not be as high performance, but to me the support is much more important. Anyhow, I have yet to find anything I do for which the performance of the ATI or Matrox cards is inadequate. I don't have any need for frame rates above 72 Hz.