Companies or the IETF really have no say in the matter.
The IETF does have a say in the matter. The IETF is not required by CALEA to develop or approve any technical standards for wiretapping. By taking a stand against it, they are supporting the position that the Internet is not entirely under the thumb of the US Congress, and that they aren't interested in helping create a police state.
This won't keep it from happening, but it will force the "standard" to be developed elsewhere. And if we're lucky, instead of one "standard", there will be a bunch (that's the great thing about standards: there are so many to choose from), so that it will be a big hassle for the FBI to actually use it.
I'm not opposing the implementation of lawful court-ordered wiretaps. But CALEA makes it really easy for them to do clandestine, unlawful wiretaps, and anything that makes this more trouble than it's worth is a good thing.
CALEA was represented to the public as simply a way to ensure that the FBI would continue to have the same wiretapping capabilities that they've traditionally had on analog phone systems. But if you read the text of the act, you'll see that it goes way beyond what would be needed for that. It gives them broad new powers far beyond what they had before, and if they happen to "accidentally" abuse these powers, it provides little to no recourse for the injured party. Anyone who doesn't think that the government is trying to create a police state should definitely read the law.
[I'm not suggesting a giant conspiracy. It doesn't take that. It just takes the cumulative effort of thousands of individual government workers who want to make the government's job easier. Some of those workers have good intentions, but the road to hell... Remember: the job of the police is only easy in a police state.]
For a lot of the transmitters, switching from 8-VSB to CODFM would just be a firmware patch, requiring no hardware changes at all.
I have a really hard time believing that. It's certainly not impossible, but it's much more likely that a system designed to modulate >19 megabits per second onto a narrow band carrier (< 6 Mhz) would be implemented as dedicated hardware in an ASIC, and not easily changed to a different standard.
Modulation at this date rate is not something that is normally done in software. A custom designed microcoded DSP, maybe, but it would probably have been designed for the specific 8VSB modulation scheme and not easily converted to CODFM.
Even simple microcontroller-based devices that I've personally hacked together very quickly usually end up taking more than a day. Only the most trivial ones were finished in a period of hours.
This is *crazy*! That's like, uhm, like sort of a hack perpetrated by someone who was in a hurry and didn't know about prior art.
Hey, give them a break. This is just the first release; if people like it and encourage them (or work on it themselves), it will undoubtedly get better with time. After all, ROM wasn't built in a day.:-)
And if a problem in a userland program causes the kernel to crash, not only is the userland program possibly broken, but the kernel is definitely broken. This core dump feature will help debug such problems.
I've personally never seen a userland program crash the Linux kernel. The closest I've come is having bugs in the X server lock up the keyboard and display, but the machine was still running fine in all other regards, and I was able to telnet in and initiate a clean reboot.
Part of the problem with doing it under Linux is where do you dump to? And how do you know the location which the kernel points to for it to dump to isn't corrupted?
This problem isn't unique to Linux. I don't know what SGI has done (either for Linux or IRIX), but an obvious approach is to use a fixed location on the disk, such as the tail end of logical cylinder 0 (normally unused), or to designate a special "core dump" partition.
Most Unices (eg Solaris, Irix, HP/UX) have some hardware support to help with doing this AFAIK,
Nope. It's all done in software. However, I could imagine that they might possibly have disk drivers with a special core-dump mode that is less dependent on the rest of the kernel, i.e., perhaps it would use polling rather than interrupts. On the other hand, maybe they just assume that the system is working well enough that the disk driver is OK. Often a panic that is caused in some other part of the system won't hurt the disk driver (although the file system code is more delicate, so a kernel dump ideally should bypass the FS).
but with the wide variety of x86 hardware, not to mention all the other platforms Linux runs on, that's not a wonderful option in Linux.
Even on other OSes the core dump doesn't always work. If things get sufficiently screwed up, the system can't write to the disk. But in my experience on other systems, core dumps work most of the time, which makes them quite worthwhile.
I worked at a router company for five years (and am going to start a new job at another router company on Monday). Our routers could core dump either to floppy or across ethernet to a TFTP server. We found core dumps to be very useful, both during development, and for analyzing failures at customer sites (which we obviously tried hard to avoid).
Some of the posters here seemed to question the utility of kernel core dumps, and point out that their kernel doesn't crash. While those people might not need the core dump feature, perhaps they should appreciate that it might help the developers maintain a high standard of quality going forward. As the Linux kernel continues to support an every increasing number of device types, expansion busses (such as 1394 and USB), file systems, etc., it will become correspondingly more difficult to keep it robust, and every tool that can be made available to the developers to assist with this should be welcomed.
Re:DVD Bootability questions not answered
on
SuSE Coming on DVD
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· Score: 1
DVD disks probably do not use ISO9660.
DVD-ROM discs can use ISO 9660, UDF, or both. El Torito bootable DVD-ROM should not be a problem, as long as the boot image is not out past 4G. (Which might someday be nearly as annoying as the 1024-cylinder problem.)
DVD-Video discs are REQUIRED to be in UDF-bridge format, which includes ISO 9660.
Economics doesn't tell you anything about what people want,
The principles of economics don't directly tell us what people want. But they tell us how to measure what people want, and how much they want it. gargle wrote:
Economics is morally vacuous. [...] he's arguing that people should reassess for themselves what they want.
No, that's not what he said. Quoting the original message from SatanLilHlpr:
to release a product of dubious value to the user.
He seems to be criticizing producers, not consumers.
gargle continued:
people themselves should decide for themselves where to go.
Again, I don't think that's at all what he said. He's complaining about producers making worthless crap:
So, *yay*, our society is the most productive and opulent in all history. Am I the only one feeling a bit hollow?
When you say "should reassess what they want", what makes you think that they assessed their wants or needs incorrectly the first time? What additional information will they have that causes their reassessment to be different? It sounds like you're claiming that people are making the wrong purchase decisions, but you're not explaining why or how to correct it.
As I stated in my previous posting, in a free market it is not generally the case that a lot of stuff gets produced that isn't what consumers want. Sure, it happens a little bit, but companies that try to do that on a large scale go out of business.
Ignoring whether SatanLilHlpr meant what you or I think he meant, how can we address this supposed "culture of excess"? Economics may not have any moral value, but by what mechanism should consumers be induced to change their purchasing habits? What should people buy (or not buy) instead of what they're buying now? Who should make the decision, and what gives them the authority to do so?
I maintain that the fact that economics is "morally vacuous" is a good thing, and that the only person qualified to impose any moral values onto someone's purchasing decisions is himself (or herself). The very idea that a person shouldn't be able to exchange the fruits of his or her labor for anything else that he or she can negotiate with another willing party seems repugnant.
If people are buying "excessive" things that you don't approve of, there must be some reason for it. Obviously their values must be different from yours, but neither you nor SatanLilHlpr have actually suggested any "better" values that the people should have. As a phrase, "culture of excess" is emotionally loaded but devoid of any meaningful content.
Success is an essentially meaningless term. Many of us know this, experiencing the meaningless thrust towards an artificial deadline, to release a product of dubious value to the user.
...
but WE FORGOT TO DECIDE WHERE WE WERE GOING BEFORE WE SET OUT ON THIS JOURNEY TO NOWHERE!!!
You are suffering from a total misunderstanding of economics. The reason we get paid to do the things we do is that someone wants them enough to pay for them!
This is the basis for a free market. The products that get produced are the products that people are willing to buy.
Certainly the market isn't 100% efficient, so some capital gets wasted producing things that are not wanted, but that's only a tiny percentage of the total production.
It was neither necessary nor even a particularly good idea to "decide where we were going". Planned economies do not work, because the feedback that happens in a market economy is replaced by arbitrary control by bureaucrats. This leads to a much higher percentage of production wasted on things no one wants.
And surely you aren't going to argue that people should be forced to buy what the government (or some other collection of smart people) think they should buy, rather than making their own decisions?
I'd strongly recommend that you read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and The Road to Serfdom by Milton Friedman. These are both available for under $10, and are two of the most approachable books on practical principles of economics.
So is there a technical explanation somewhere, more detailed than just saying that the 512th byte of a sector can be corrupted if the computer is playing video at the same time? We need more detail than that if we want to write a workaround for the Linux fd driver.
Reportedly such systems are already in use at racetracks to screen customers from whom they will not accept bets. I just heard about this recently. I don't know enough about racetrack operations to understand why they wouldn't take bets from just anyone.
Of course it's not the registrar'r job to enforce trademark law. If I put an advertisement in the newspaper, it's not the newspaper's job to research whether I'm entitled to use any trademarks that are present. Heck, it's not even their job to research what words and symbols are trademarked.
But what the boffins can't explain is WHY rich countries have stopped having babies
Maybe the rich folks have figured out that there's only a finite amount of wealth (at any given time) to spread around, whereas there's more than enough poverty for everyone.
even the space shuttle is less complicated (mechanically and electrically anyway) a piece of work than the software contained on just about any fully loaded personal computer in use today,
I don't believe that. The engineering drawings for a much simpler craft such as a 747 occupy over eighty feet of shelf space; I doubt that the engineering drawings for the space shuttle would even fit in my house. If you have any real numbers that can be used for comparison, I'd love to see them.
If instead we are willing to settle for software that works 99%+ of the time when it first ships, and then have the company fix all bugs that are found promptly and release free updates (containing bug fixes), then we are willing to settle for something that can actually happen.
That doesn't contradict my claim. We accept cars that aren't better than 99% perfect either. Every car I've owned has had at least one stupid design flaw that seemed relatively obvious. I'm not saying that we should sue all the car manufacturers. I'm just saying that where product liability is concerned, there's no rational basis for giving software vendors any special consideration than is given to any other kind of manufacturer.
If I could be sued for every bug in every program I have written, I would never publicly release software.
In that case I'd suggest that you never publicly release software, since AFAIK there is no law in place that prevents you from being sued over bugs in your programs.
You seem to be suggesting that software vendors shouldn't be responsible for their product merely because software is complex and hard to debug. By that reasoning I don't see why auto makers should be held responsible for their products either, since automobiles have gotten to be pretty complex and hard to debug. And the companies that build nuclear reactors (such as General Electric) obviously shouldn't be held responsible for their products for the same reason.
I strongly object to the idea that software vendors should not be held to the same product liability standards as any other sort of manufacturer. Contrary to the popular conception, software is NOT fundamentally any less robust or more error-prone than any other technology of comparable complexity, or even, for that matter, non-technical systems of comparable complexity, such as law. Software bugs are caused by complexity, not because of some magic characteristic of software. Complexity is the basis for the law of unintended consequences.
The US government should have no right to wiretap.
The US government has no rights of any kind. They only have limited powers granted to them by the people in the Constitution.
This may seem like nitpicking, but it's actually a very important distinction, because forgetting it leads people down the path where they believe that the government is in the position to grant certain rights to the people, and nothing could be further from the truth.
The people have rights, and the most that the government is supposed to have power to do is to place certain minimal limits on those rights.
One of the major reasons the Bill of Rights was controversial was not because anyone thought that the ideas therein were bad, but because they were afraid that if they enumerated certain rights of the people, that the people (and government) would start to believe that the people had only those rights, and that they were somehow granted by the government. In order to placate those concerns, the Tenth Amendment was added, but unfortunately despite that people (and government) have in fact fallen into exactly that trap.
Here's a brief article I recently wrote about this subject.
Every packet you send over the Internet goes through an unpredictable path to its destination. And
everyone knows this.
Well, then, everyone is wrong.
If everyone would bother playing with simple, widely available tools like traceroute, everyone would discover that in reality, traffic between two given hosts tends to traverse the exact same route for long periods of time (typically at least hours or days).
attempts to replace DES. Hardly obscure! And certainly well-tested!
Well-tested? Hardly! They've only been publicly described for a few years. If you talk the the experts, they'll tell you to use triple-DES, because DES has withstood decades of attacks, and there still aren't any attacks against it that are significantly more computationally efficient than brute force. Since a 56-bit key is demonstrably short enough to be readily cracked by brute force, going to triple-DES is advised.
I've not seen any credible claims that any of the NIST candidates are believed to be more secure than triple-DES.
but I would've like to see some more support for DVD playback. HDTV support is cool but
Proper HDTV support requires mostly a superset of what is required for DVD support; everything but the subpicture decode.
I think that a full MPEG 2 decoder, that would be a little excessive since that would mean adding an audio output to the card.
No, adding an MPEG 2 decoder to the card doesn't necessitate adding an audio output.
This can be done two ways:
Leave the demux of the MPEG transport or program stream to the main CPU, and only hand the video PES (or ES) to the card. Demux is fairly easy and won't suck up but a tiny fraction of the main CPU as compared to doing full decode.
Let the card demux the transport or program stream, and hand buffered audio PES (or ES) data back to the main CPU.
As for software decoders, the ones for Windows don't seem very optimized.
They're not very good, but that's not because they're not very optimized. Just compare any of the Windows players to the NIST code if you want to see the huge difference between majorly optimized and non-optimized decoders.
Slashdot Mirror
This won't keep it from happening, but it will force the "standard" to be developed elsewhere. And if we're lucky, instead of one "standard", there will be a bunch (that's the great thing about standards: there are so many to choose from), so that it will be a big hassle for the FBI to actually use it.
I'm not opposing the implementation of lawful court-ordered wiretaps. But CALEA makes it really easy for them to do clandestine, unlawful wiretaps, and anything that makes this more trouble than it's worth is a good thing.
CALEA was represented to the public as simply a way to ensure that the FBI would continue to have the same wiretapping capabilities that they've traditionally had on analog phone systems. But if you read the text of the act, you'll see that it goes way beyond what would be needed for that. It gives them broad new powers far beyond what they had before, and if they happen to "accidentally" abuse these powers, it provides little to no recourse for the injured party. Anyone who doesn't think that the government is trying to create a police state should definitely read the law.
[I'm not suggesting a giant conspiracy. It doesn't take that. It just takes the cumulative effort of thousands of individual government workers who want to make the government's job easier. Some of those workers have good intentions, but the road to hell... Remember: the job of the police is only easy in a police state.]
Modulation at this date rate is not something that is normally done in software. A custom designed microcoded DSP, maybe, but it would probably have been designed for the specific 8VSB modulation scheme and not easily converted to CODFM.
For some examples, see my PIC page.
I've personally never seen a userland program crash the Linux kernel. The closest I've come is having bugs in the X server lock up the keyboard and display, but the machine was still running fine in all other regards, and I was able to telnet in and initiate a clean reboot.
Even on other OSes the core dump doesn't always work. If things get sufficiently screwed up, the system can't write to the disk. But in my experience on other systems, core dumps work most of the time, which makes them quite worthwhile.
I worked at a router company for five years (and am going to start a new job at another router company on Monday). Our routers could core dump either to floppy or across ethernet to a TFTP server. We found core dumps to be very useful, both during development, and for analyzing failures at customer sites (which we obviously tried hard to avoid).
Some of the posters here seemed to question the utility of kernel core dumps, and point out that their kernel doesn't crash. While those people might not need the core dump feature, perhaps they should appreciate that it might help the developers maintain a high standard of quality going forward. As the Linux kernel continues to support an every increasing number of device types, expansion busses (such as 1394 and USB), file systems, etc., it will become correspondingly more difficult to keep it robust, and every tool that can be made available to the developers to assist with this should be welcomed.
DVD-Video discs are REQUIRED to be in UDF-bridge format, which includes ISO 9660.
gargle continued:
Again, I don't think that's at all what he said. He's complaining about producers making worthless crap: When you say "should reassess what they want", what makes you think that they assessed their wants or needs incorrectly the first time? What additional information will they have that causes their reassessment to be different? It sounds like you're claiming that people are making the wrong purchase decisions, but you're not explaining why or how to correct it.As I stated in my previous posting, in a free market it is not generally the case that a lot of stuff gets produced that isn't what consumers want. Sure, it happens a little bit, but companies that try to do that on a large scale go out of business.
Ignoring whether SatanLilHlpr meant what you or I think he meant, how can we address this supposed "culture of excess"? Economics may not have any moral value, but by what mechanism should consumers be induced to change their purchasing habits? What should people buy (or not buy) instead of what they're buying now? Who should make the decision, and what gives them the authority to do so?
I maintain that the fact that economics is "morally vacuous" is a good thing, and that the only person qualified to impose any moral values onto someone's purchasing decisions is himself (or herself). The very idea that a person shouldn't be able to exchange the fruits of his or her labor for anything else that he or she can negotiate with another willing party seems repugnant.
If people are buying "excessive" things that you don't approve of, there must be some reason for it. Obviously their values must be different from yours, but neither you nor SatanLilHlpr have actually suggested any "better" values that the people should have. As a phrase, "culture of excess" is emotionally loaded but devoid of any meaningful content.
This is the basis for a free market. The products that get produced are the products that people are willing to buy.
Certainly the market isn't 100% efficient, so some capital gets wasted producing things that are not wanted, but that's only a tiny percentage of the total production.
It was neither necessary nor even a particularly good idea to "decide where we were going". Planned economies do not work, because the feedback that happens in a market economy is replaced by arbitrary control by bureaucrats. This leads to a much higher percentage of production wasted on things no one wants.
And surely you aren't going to argue that people should be forced to buy what the government (or some other collection of smart people) think they should buy, rather than making their own decisions?
I'd strongly recommend that you read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and The Road to Serfdom by Milton Friedman. These are both available for under $10, and are two of the most approachable books on practical principles of economics.
So is there a technical explanation somewhere, more detailed than just saying that the 512th byte of a sector can be corrupted if the computer is playing video at the same time? We need more detail than that if we want to write a workaround for the Linux fd driver.
Reportedly such systems are already in use at racetracks to screen customers from whom they will not accept bets. I just heard about this recently. I don't know enough about racetrack operations to understand why they wouldn't take bets from just anyone.
Of course it's not the registrar'r job to enforce trademark law. If I put an advertisement in the newspaper, it's not the newspaper's job to research whether I'm entitled to use any trademarks that are present. Heck, it's not even their job to research what words and symbols are trademarked.
However, Netscape has a patent on SSL. They apparently haven't been trying to force people to license it... yet.
But what if NetscAOL were to sell the patent to those bastards at RSADI?
When the RSA patent expires next year, it will be nice to see these people have to drop their prices to a sane level.
You seem to be suggesting that software vendors shouldn't be responsible for their product merely because software is complex and hard to debug. By that reasoning I don't see why auto makers should be held responsible for their products either, since automobiles have gotten to be pretty complex and hard to debug. And the companies that build nuclear reactors (such as General Electric) obviously shouldn't be held responsible for their products for the same reason.
I strongly object to the idea that software vendors should not be held to the same product liability standards as any other sort of manufacturer. Contrary to the popular conception, software is NOT fundamentally any less robust or more error-prone than any other technology of comparable complexity, or even, for that matter, non-technical systems of comparable complexity, such as law. Software bugs are caused by complexity, not because of some magic characteristic of software. Complexity is the basis for the law of unintended consequences.
Yes, there's an upgrade available for the first edition. It's a sticker to place on the cover that changes the leading "U" of "Ultimate" to "Penu".
Yes, my doctor told me to avoid caffiene for that reason. But I have less problem with reflux when I drink more iced tea.
This may seem like nitpicking, but it's actually a very important distinction, because forgetting it leads people down the path where they believe that the government is in the position to grant certain rights to the people, and nothing could be further from the truth.
The people have rights, and the most that the government is supposed to have power to do is to place certain minimal limits on those rights.
One of the major reasons the Bill of Rights was controversial was not because anyone thought that the ideas therein were bad, but because they were afraid that if they enumerated certain rights of the people, that the people (and government) would start to believe that the people had only those rights, and that they were somehow granted by the government. In order to placate those concerns, the Tenth Amendment was added, but unfortunately despite that people (and government) have in fact fallen into exactly that trap.
Here's a brief article I recently wrote about this subject.
If everyone would bother playing with simple, widely available tools like traceroute, everyone would discover that in reality, traffic between two given hosts tends to traverse the exact same route for long periods of time (typically at least hours or days).
Just think about it. If there was a reliable way to determine this, then the investigation would be ineffectual.
I've not seen any credible claims that any of the NIST candidates are believed to be more secure than triple-DES.
This can be done two ways:
- Leave the demux of the MPEG transport or program stream to the main CPU, and only hand the video PES (or ES) to the card. Demux is fairly easy and won't suck up but a tiny fraction of the main CPU as compared to doing full decode.
- Let the card demux the transport or program stream, and hand buffered audio PES (or ES) data back to the main CPU.
They're not very good, but that's not because they're not very optimized. Just compare any of the Windows players to the NIST code if you want to see the huge difference between majorly optimized and non-optimized decoders.