This isn't about adding a new device driver. It's about having the device driver detect a revision of a chipset. It's fairly easy to test and a very LOW risk change. Not doing so means an entire line of motherboards are not supported.
You have to use your brain to determine what's a high and low risk change. Adding an entirely new driver, high risk. Adding a device ID to a list for an existing driver? Low risk. *NOT ADDING* the driver? High risk of user unsatisfaction.
I'm not against Vista [though I am], I'm not for it [truth], I just don't care. Are we not yet over the novelty of Vista yet or what? It's basically Windows XP++, big deal.
Your argument falls apart because #3 doesn't hold true.
Stealing a Wii is much harder than to copyright violate an artist by acquiring an mp3. One involves depriving someone of property, while they're not paying attention, the other involves a click of a mouse.
I could see if stealing a Wii could be done over Kazaa or Napster [or whatever kids run nowadays]. But it isn't.
Plus nobody is saying that copyright violations are justified. The author was saying that the reason copyright violations rise in the face of DRM is that acquiring non-licensed materials is so easy, and often results in HIGHER VALUE assets. In short, there is little to no incentive to buy DRM laden media.
That's miles away from saying there is no incentive to buy media. People would rather have control over their assets than the random smorgasborg that is P2P. I want to know that if I buy mp3s that they are from the source, not a rip of a rip of a rip, with a high quality encoder, using a known [preferably high] bitrate. And I'll pay to get that.
What I won't pay for are windows-only restricted media files that don't allow me to transfer them to other playing devices, or re-encode them to fit on smaller memory devices as the occasion requires.
Now, if you, the producer, only make restricted DRM media available and I really want your tracks, I'll probably just copy them instead of buying them. Is it "right?" No. But that's the reality of the situation. Now had they just tried to sell me high quality un-drm'ed MP3s they would have made a sale.
itunes uses AAC and from I've read sounds decent, but it's still DRM laden.
What people want is to buy CDs and know that they're actually CDs and not some data CD with PCM tracks "hidden" on it. In short, people want what they're prepared to pay for.
Whatever. This is why newbs mock OSS. If a one line trivial change causes WW3 between developers, just because Intel decided to up a PCI devid value... we have problems.
Out of the box, the latest kernel wouldn't work on my mobo [when I got it]. That means LINUX IS BROKEN. The fix? Add one line to a eth device drivers list of recognized device IDs. What does the community do? Reject it until MONTHS LATER. Many newcomers would look at that and say "fine I'll go to Windows or BSD."
How are we supposed to build a community of trust and co-operation if we can't resolve single line fixes to code that enable hardware to work?
Kids have "raves" and other fun trance related activities. Don't you think I feel odd as a 25 year old to be hanging out at afterparties with a bunch of 18 year olds... hey wait a minute...:-)
You can still do crazy things nowadays. They're just less dangerous. My brother and I used to drive all around upperstate new york [we live in Ottawa] when we just got our licenses. Was a "big trip" to drive the hour to the US, then another two or so to syracuse. Lots of fun to be had.
The trick is not to do what the older gen is doing [at least not explicitly]. Define fun in your own way.
JLC's/dev/random patches replaced the ad hoc poorly designed PRNG with one based on Fortuna, a real PRNG.
I suggest you look at the/dev/random source for a bit. For starters, what the fuck is TwoThirdsMD4? Why is it used? etc... The design may work, but we can certainly do better, with cleaner code, that makes use of the existing crypto in the kernel (instead of including multiple copies). Last I looked their SHA1 code wasn't even compliant [didn't do byte ordering swapping, which doesn't affect the security just compliance]./dev/random can easily be cleaned up, improved, and made to use standard crypto primitives. It just means we have to dissolve Ted T'so ego and beat him with a clue stick.
In the case of my patches, they were against [iirc] 2.6.18.2 not 2.6.19-rc2 or something. The last "." is supposed to be for incremental changes to reduce the time between major releases. It gives users a chance to try a work-in-progress kernel that has been through at least some testing. Otherwise, why even have the fourth level of releases?
I'm hardly the only person on earth disillusioned by the Linux kernel process. Sure it works, but the code is hardly ideal and pushing away contributors is NOT the way to make things better.
Hey at least you have some competition. Here in Canada GSM is provided by Rogers. That's it. And your DSL? By bell [or a reseller which is the same thing].
The gentoo fix was to add the same IDs [and a few more].
My complaint isn't that they weren't added, it's that the maintainer refused to add them to the vanilla kernel [e.g. at kernel.org] and instead horded them for Gentoo-sources [even though I run gentoo I still feel this is wrong]. Eventually at the next major release they were added. So it's not that the device IDs were wrong or caused problems. It's that the developer didn't want to share them with the rest of the Linux crowd.
You should ask Jean-Luc Cooke about his experience trying to replace the horrible/dev/random device with one based on Fortuna. He got the same royal decreed from Ted T'so about "who owns the kernel" and who doesn't. In the end, Jean-Luc just gave up and withdrew the patches.
The kernel is, for the most part, a horribly written, and poorly maintain piece of code. The maintainers are selfish ego-hording losers and have to really learn there is more people willing to contribute then just them.
Ah, hubris of the troll. Congrats you're upset in public. What did that accomplish? People don't need folk like you to make up their minds about others. Or are you saying everyone on slashdot is stupid and needs your deep insight to figure out what's what?
Give me a call when you grow up kid. Maybe you have a fighting chance at being a decent human being, but right now it's hard to tell.
True, hence the backups. I also don't run commercial proprietary software on my workstation. If it needs a CD key I don't use it. At the office, is another story. But there we have a lot more backups and control of errant processes.
The point of writing software is to solve a problem, the point of supporting it is to make money.:-)
Well yeah that's the flipside. Some people report "bugs" which are things that cannot really be exploited in the field [e.g. unreachable exploits]. I deal with that in my OSS work as well. Though, usually I fix them anyways just for completeness. In fact, a non-trivial amount of bugs I've fixed have been of that sort [I wouldn't say a majority but definitely not just a few].
Some people like the press it gets for finding them too.
That being said, some projects react bad to bugs. GCC is an example of a group who react well to them. I've had several PR's fixed because of a simple ICE or asm dump I sent in. Whereas in the Linux camp, bug fixing is a royal right only a few can have. When I wanted to add device IDs for Intel NICs to the 2.6.18.2 [iirc] kernel I submitted a patch which added them. It was refused saying that they would be added in the next major release cycle. Even after I told them that they could trivially be added to the next point release they still refused. Oddly enough the maintainer, a Gentoo developer, added them to the gentoo brand of the kernel anyways. Go co-operation!
I dunno, for me it's a sense of responsibility. If I'm going to release software that can potentially cause problems for others, I make sure I respond to valid reports as soon as possible. I don't look at it as a negative experience because for me the alternative is to stop sharing the code alltogether.
While I understand that most people work on prof's pet projects for their masters, I say that's a fairly lame way to go. If you're a smart fellow you should be able to find problems in your respective field that you want to solve.
If you're of college age and you need someone else to tell you what to work on... chances are you're not ready to go out in the "real world" just yet.
Part of the college experience is becoming an adult, self reliant, and all that jazz. Unfortunately, all too often they confuse "adult" with "able to drink and have unsafe sex with multiple partners per week."
Agreed. It's not where you study but what you do when you're there that matters.
I went to a community college, but I decided to start open source projects while I was there. As a result, I've given talks internationally, and my software is used in some pretty cool places (industry, academia, other OSS projects like Tcl, OLPC, etc). Oh and I got a decent job out of college.
If you go to school "just to get the paper" even if it's from a top name school, you have to compete with all the other students for jobs/positions in your future. You have to put an effort into developing your portfolio before you grad. Otherwise, you're just another name with a degree.
That and once you're out of school nobody really cares where you studied. When I worked at AMD they just cared that I had some post-secondary degree. Technically AMD requires a masters degree (which I don't have) to work as a software engineer. They hired me anyways based on the need mostly, but also on the fact that I had proven myself competent through my projects. I left AMD to take a lower pace job (traveling %50 of the time sucks) that pays nearly as much. They too didn't care about the lack of a masters even though all my peers have their pinky rings and a masters.
grade school == small kids == not exactly best use of computers. Think about it, your short stories in grade 2, were what? Maybe 100 words long at most? That exercise wasn't just to get your grammatical syntax juice flowing. It was to also get your hand used to handwriting, etc.
Same thing with math. We had "mathblaster" [with the gamepad thingy] back in my day. But we were expected to know how to add 17 to 23 by long hand. Why? So we could understand the mechanics of arithmetic. Sure kids have computer at home nowadays (damn brats!) but that doesn't mean all of the classwork should be on one.
That "star trek" future with the PADDs everywhere doesn't work IMHO. There is something to be said for doing things manually at the formative stage. That and the budget hardly calls for it. We can hardly pay the damn teachers, keep fresh books on the shelves, etc. Buying laptops for each student is hardly the best budgetary move (especially since as you pointed out, they have computers at home).
It makes sense in third world nations [e.g. OLPC] since the laptop is their gateway to knowledge. It replaces the books and other resources that they don't have [but should].
They're called laptops. But that said, little kids don't need laptops or desktops at their desks. They can use them just fine in a computer lab.
What do you think kids of yesteryear did? Sure we had a computer in the classroom. It was an Apple ][ and you had to share it with 23 other classmates. OH NOES!!!
I just don't think a kid in school will learn "more" or "better" by spending money putting computers at their personal desks.
The trick to using LaTeX safely is automation. The less TeX twiddling you have to do manually the better.
For me, I write my user manuals [for my FL/OSS projects] in LaTeX because the layout is much better, and the process much simpler than wrestling with a word processor.
Why anyone writes books in anything else is beyond me.
My first book [math text] that was published was all LaTeX, and while it wasn't all super simple the vast majority of the layout and setting work was handled by TeX itself. My second book [crypto text] was written in Word [required by publisher] and the tables were not set properly, equations look like shit, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about adding a new device driver. It's about having the device driver detect a revision of a chipset. It's fairly easy to test and a very LOW risk change. Not doing so means an entire line of motherboards are not supported.
You have to use your brain to determine what's a high and low risk change. Adding an entirely new driver, high risk. Adding a device ID to a list for an existing driver? Low risk. *NOT ADDING* the driver? High risk of user unsatisfaction.
Tom
Vanity article about Vista ... again ...
I'm not against Vista [though I am], I'm not for it [truth], I just don't care. Are we not yet over the novelty of Vista yet or what? It's basically Windows XP++, big deal.
Tom
Your argument falls apart because #3 doesn't hold true.
Stealing a Wii is much harder than to copyright violate an artist by acquiring an mp3. One involves depriving someone of property, while they're not paying attention, the other involves a click of a mouse.
I could see if stealing a Wii could be done over Kazaa or Napster [or whatever kids run nowadays]. But it isn't.
Plus nobody is saying that copyright violations are justified. The author was saying that the reason copyright violations rise in the face of DRM is that acquiring non-licensed materials is so easy, and often results in HIGHER VALUE assets. In short, there is little to no incentive to buy DRM laden media.
That's miles away from saying there is no incentive to buy media. People would rather have control over their assets than the random smorgasborg that is P2P. I want to know that if I buy mp3s that they are from the source, not a rip of a rip of a rip, with a high quality encoder, using a known [preferably high] bitrate. And I'll pay to get that.
What I won't pay for are windows-only restricted media files that don't allow me to transfer them to other playing devices, or re-encode them to fit on smaller memory devices as the occasion requires.
Now, if you, the producer, only make restricted DRM media available and I really want your tracks, I'll probably just copy them instead of buying them. Is it "right?" No. But that's the reality of the situation. Now had they just tried to sell me high quality un-drm'ed MP3s they would have made a sale.
Tom
legal 128kbps mp3 == not useful.
itunes uses AAC and from I've read sounds decent, but it's still DRM laden.
What people want is to buy CDs and know that they're actually CDs and not some data CD with PCM tracks "hidden" on it. In short, people want what they're prepared to pay for.
Tom
Whatever. This is why newbs mock OSS. If a one line trivial change causes WW3 between developers, just because Intel decided to up a PCI devid value ... we have problems.
Out of the box, the latest kernel wouldn't work on my mobo [when I got it]. That means LINUX IS BROKEN. The fix? Add one line to a eth device drivers list of recognized device IDs. What does the community do? Reject it until MONTHS LATER. Many newcomers would look at that and say "fine I'll go to Windows or BSD."
How are we supposed to build a community of trust and co-operation if we can't resolve single line fixes to code that enable hardware to work?
Tom
Kids have "raves" and other fun trance related activities. Don't you think I feel odd as a 25 year old to be hanging out at afterparties with a bunch of 18 year olds... hey wait a minute... :-)
You can still do crazy things nowadays. They're just less dangerous. My brother and I used to drive all around upperstate new york [we live in Ottawa] when we just got our licenses. Was a "big trip" to drive the hour to the US, then another two or so to syracuse. Lots of fun to be had.
The trick is not to do what the older gen is doing [at least not explicitly]. Define fun in your own way.
Tom
Ok, so if you jay walk in front of my car, I should burn your house down? mmm random vigilante justice is fun.
Why not just, not accept known bad keys?
Tom
JLC's /dev/random patches replaced the ad hoc poorly designed PRNG with one based on Fortuna, a real PRNG.
/dev/random source for a bit. For starters, what the fuck is TwoThirdsMD4? Why is it used? etc... The design may work, but we can certainly do better, with cleaner code, that makes use of the existing crypto in the kernel (instead of including multiple copies). Last I looked their SHA1 code wasn't even compliant [didn't do byte ordering swapping, which doesn't affect the security just compliance]. /dev/random can easily be cleaned up, improved, and made to use standard crypto primitives. It just means we have to dissolve Ted T'so ego and beat him with a clue stick.
I suggest you look at the
In the case of my patches, they were against [iirc] 2.6.18.2 not 2.6.19-rc2 or something. The last "." is supposed to be for incremental changes to reduce the time between major releases. It gives users a chance to try a work-in-progress kernel that has been through at least some testing. Otherwise, why even have the fourth level of releases?
I'm hardly the only person on earth disillusioned by the Linux kernel process. Sure it works, but the code is hardly ideal and pushing away contributors is NOT the way to make things better.
Tom
Hey at least you have some competition. Here in Canada GSM is provided by Rogers. That's it. And your DSL? By bell [or a reseller which is the same thing].
Go monopoly, the game the whole country can play!
Tom
The gentoo fix was to add the same IDs [and a few more].
/dev/random device with one based on Fortuna. He got the same royal decreed from Ted T'so about "who owns the kernel" and who doesn't. In the end, Jean-Luc just gave up and withdrew the patches.
My complaint isn't that they weren't added, it's that the maintainer refused to add them to the vanilla kernel [e.g. at kernel.org] and instead horded them for Gentoo-sources [even though I run gentoo I still feel this is wrong]. Eventually at the next major release they were added. So it's not that the device IDs were wrong or caused problems. It's that the developer didn't want to share them with the rest of the Linux crowd.
You should ask Jean-Luc Cooke about his experience trying to replace the horrible
The kernel is, for the most part, a horribly written, and poorly maintain piece of code. The maintainers are selfish ego-hording losers and have to really learn there is more people willing to contribute then just them.
Tom
Ah, hubris of the troll. Congrats you're upset in public. What did that accomplish? People don't need folk like you to make up their minds about others. Or are you saying everyone on slashdot is stupid and needs your deep insight to figure out what's what?
Give me a call when you grow up kid. Maybe you have a fighting chance at being a decent human being, but right now it's hard to tell.
Tom
True, hence the backups. I also don't run commercial proprietary software on my workstation. If it needs a CD key I don't use it. At the office, is another story. But there we have a lot more backups and control of errant processes.
:-)
The point of writing software is to solve a problem, the point of supporting it is to make money.
Tom
what it deletes is an install file for the program, hey all the power to you.
But even if I were pirating your program, you have no right to damage my computer.
Also I don't run as a root.
And I back up my files.
Tom
Well yeah that's the flipside. Some people report "bugs" which are things that cannot really be exploited in the field [e.g. unreachable exploits]. I deal with that in my OSS work as well. Though, usually I fix them anyways just for completeness. In fact, a non-trivial amount of bugs I've fixed have been of that sort [I wouldn't say a majority but definitely not just a few].
Some people like the press it gets for finding them too.
That being said, some projects react bad to bugs. GCC is an example of a group who react well to them. I've had several PR's fixed because of a simple ICE or asm dump I sent in. Whereas in the Linux camp, bug fixing is a royal right only a few can have. When I wanted to add device IDs for Intel NICs to the 2.6.18.2 [iirc] kernel I submitted a patch which added them. It was refused saying that they would be added in the next major release cycle. Even after I told them that they could trivially be added to the next point release they still refused. Oddly enough the maintainer, a Gentoo developer, added them to the gentoo brand of the kernel anyways. Go co-operation!
I dunno, for me it's a sense of responsibility. If I'm going to release software that can potentially cause problems for others, I make sure I respond to valid reports as soon as possible. I don't look at it as a negative experience because for me the alternative is to stop sharing the code alltogether.
Tom
While I understand that most people work on prof's pet projects for their masters, I say that's a fairly lame way to go. If you're a smart fellow you should be able to find problems in your respective field that you want to solve.
... chances are you're not ready to go out in the "real world" just yet.
If you're of college age and you need someone else to tell you what to work on
Part of the college experience is becoming an adult, self reliant, and all that jazz. Unfortunately, all too often they confuse "adult" with "able to drink and have unsafe sex with multiple partners per week."
bah...
Tom
As the author of security software, I'm not happy to find flaws in my code, but I'd rather find them then not.
The measure of success is whether the bug(s) found in Feb are new additions added by sloppy coders, or legacy bugs that have so far escaped notice?
Tom
Agreed. It's not where you study but what you do when you're there that matters.
I went to a community college, but I decided to start open source projects while I was there. As a result, I've given talks internationally, and my software is used in some pretty cool places (industry, academia, other OSS projects like Tcl, OLPC, etc). Oh and I got a decent job out of college.
If you go to school "just to get the paper" even if it's from a top name school, you have to compete with all the other students for jobs/positions in your future. You have to put an effort into developing your portfolio before you grad. Otherwise, you're just another name with a degree.
That and once you're out of school nobody really cares where you studied. When I worked at AMD they just cared that I had some post-secondary degree. Technically AMD requires a masters degree (which I don't have) to work as a software engineer. They hired me anyways based on the need mostly, but also on the fact that I had proven myself competent through my projects. I left AMD to take a lower pace job (traveling %50 of the time sucks) that pays nearly as much. They too didn't care about the lack of a masters even though all my peers have their pinky rings and a masters.
Tom
I dunno, we had lawn darts, slip and slides, and other "fun" activities.
School will be boring most of the time, with or without computers.
Hell, work ain't that much fun and I have *two* computers at my desk (omg wowwowwee!).
Tom
grade school == small kids == not exactly best use of computers. Think about it, your short stories in grade 2, were what? Maybe 100 words long at most? That exercise wasn't just to get your grammatical syntax juice flowing. It was to also get your hand used to handwriting, etc.
Same thing with math. We had "mathblaster" [with the gamepad thingy] back in my day. But we were expected to know how to add 17 to 23 by long hand. Why? So we could understand the mechanics of arithmetic. Sure kids have computer at home nowadays (damn brats!) but that doesn't mean all of the classwork should be on one.
That "star trek" future with the PADDs everywhere doesn't work IMHO. There is something to be said for doing things manually at the formative stage. That and the budget hardly calls for it. We can hardly pay the damn teachers, keep fresh books on the shelves, etc. Buying laptops for each student is hardly the best budgetary move (especially since as you pointed out, they have computers at home).
It makes sense in third world nations [e.g. OLPC] since the laptop is their gateway to knowledge. It replaces the books and other resources that they don't have [but should].
Tom
Little tip, if your book has any technical edge to it, learn LaTeX and do the layout/setting yourself.
... Just saying. not bitter.
Being in control of the layout and setting is very important if you value your creation at all.
Tom
They're called laptops. But that said, little kids don't need laptops or desktops at their desks. They can use them just fine in a computer lab.
What do you think kids of yesteryear did? Sure we had a computer in the classroom. It was an Apple ][ and you had to share it with 23 other classmates. OH NOES!!!
I just don't think a kid in school will learn "more" or "better" by spending money putting computers at their personal desks.
Tom
The trick to using LaTeX safely is automation. The less TeX twiddling you have to do manually the better.
For me, I write my user manuals [for my FL/OSS projects] in LaTeX because the layout is much better, and the process much simpler than wrestling with a word processor.
Why anyone writes books in anything else is beyond me.
My first book [math text] that was published was all LaTeX, and while it wasn't all super simple the vast majority of the layout and setting work was handled by TeX itself. My second book [crypto text] was written in Word [required by publisher] and the tables were not set properly, equations look like shit, etc.
Word processor == memos, letter home to Grandma.
Typesetter == Papers, Books, Print material
Tom
Stop paying your rental fees, lose your files. Ah, what a beautiful industry!
Tom
English doesn't have a unique word for libre (e.g. free as in freedom). So I use libre instead.
People should realize there is more to "free software" than not having to pay money to use it.
Tom
My reply claims I knew it was a joke. My complaint was that it was a BAD joke.
Your reading apparatus is broken, go DIACF. Stupid low UID luddites...
Tom