About two years ago I was in the same place you are. I wanted sound on my notebook, and, while a driver did exist for my chipset, it was extremely buggy with my particular setup and resulted in an instantaneous hard freeze. It didn't appear to be under any further development, and, to make matters worse, the specs for the chip hadn't been released and the author, having "divined" them out of thin air, did not wish to be contacted. So I undertook to debug it myself.
Let me say that, at least for me, this was not like debugging any of the userspace programs that I had done before. If you're like me, when your program crashes, you first up gdb, load the core, and backtrace/step from there. First of all, there's no core dump. In this case I didn't even have the luxury of an oops readout; as I would find out later this particular bug was locking the computer even before the kernel could flush its output buffers and print to the screen.
So I had to start meticulously reconstructing the function call stack using printk(). It took me awhile before I figured out why none of these were getting printed (for the reason I just mentioned.) So that didn't work either.
I searched high and low but never did find a way to debug the kernel that was as easy as using gdb to debug a userspace program, and that's not saying much. No stepping, no backtraces, nada. The "bug" in my particular driver consisted of a single offending line which wrote an 8-bit register and was not to spec. I would have never ferreted it out if I hadn't "stumbled" across the NDA'd specs myself.
Anyways, moral of the story: kernel debugging sucks for really hard bugs. If anyone knows of better tools to use kindly inform me of them.
We have had this in the UC Berkeley computer science department for some time now. IIRC it's been quite effective; when it was first unveiled it nailed many, many students for cheating (I think). The verdict amongst students is, if you're good enough to defeat the cheating detector then doing the assignment on your own should be no problem anyways.
About 10 years ago, or whenever HTML first emerged, I suppose you would have been right. But HTML seems to have quickly morphed into some odd mixture of presentation and markup. Did you ever wonder why and do the exact same thing (or and ?) One would suggest that HTML is a description language; the other, presentation. Don't even get me started about (which appears to have died the death it so deserved, finally, although it's still in the CSS 2.0 spec!) Particularly with MS having won the browser war in 96 or 97, we've seen literally years worth of proprietary "feature additions" to HTML that have absolutely nothing to do with describing the document and everything to do with governing presentation. If you want a good example, take a look at the atrocious code autogenerated by the MS Office apps. I still have nightmares about it. It tries to basically make the outputted page look identical to whatever you are seeing in Word or Excel, which I guess must make Joe User feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But there's just no way to do that without controlling aspects of presentation (and when you have the monopoly browser, I reckon that's pretty easy to do.)
Precisely. In fact, I'd go ever further and say that, if you spend a lot of time compiling, you should always forego getting the fastest processor and the market and buy 2 of whatever costs half the price, and build yourself an SMP box. First, the performance gain with SMP is basically linear for compilation, assuming you're using a good value for make -j. Second, it's been my experience that a pair of 700Mhz PIIIs usually beats my 1.5Ghz P4 handily for kernel compiles and many other things. Granted it's kind of comparing apples to oranges but it's a starting point.
It's a convenience feature. They are all interoperable. The way the format is set up, if Word 97 encounters something it doesn't recognize (like some formatting command or feature that got added in later) it just ignores it. So if you start using features in Word XP that weren't there before you have no guarantee that your document will look the same when it comes up on 2000 or 97. "Disable Word 97 features" gives you that assurance, if you want it. It's not required. In my experience, whether that's enabled or not, all the text and much of the formatting (e.g. the "gist" of the document) survives. I call that interoperable; you can niggle about rhetoric all you want.
Well, probably because Wordpad cannot save files in the current.doc format and has never been able to (makes sense to me, why cut into the Word market?) It can only write out files in RTF or text format, or in some versions old.doc formats (like Word 6). So it's likely that you named the file.doc but saved it as a Rich Text Format file, which would mean that Word is only doing its job by telling you isn't not a.doc-format file when you try to open it.
Oh, and I've wrestled with this one for the past half hour and I still can't figure out what you mean when you say, "Their products seem easy to use, but they really aren't that easy." Could you please elaborate? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
I grant you that their security sucks, so I probably shouldn't call them "good" products. But in terms of ease-of-use, in terms of UI, they're far and away above all the competition with the exception of MacOS.
I think you've missed the point. There is no such thing as "Save As" Word 97 or "Save As" Word 2000 because it's all the same format. You can "Save As" Word 95, because that was that last version using a different format. Otherwise, they're all the same.
That is completely incorrect. The Microsoft Word document format has remained the same since the Office 97 suite. Word 97 can read files saved by Word XP or Word 2000. Their respective feature sets differ, so Word 97 isn't going to pick up on newfangled things like "table styles" that were introduced in later versions. But for plain old text and tables, they are all interoperable. In fact, in a specific attempt to make the different versions interoperate, Microsoft added a feature in Word XP entitled "Disable features not available in Word 97". It's under Tool->Options->Save if you're interested.
And by the way, you shouldn't be so quick to underestimate Microsoft's morals/motives. They're monopolistic and nosy and untrustworthy, granted, but they do make good products that are easy to use and featureful. It's naive to believe that they are into just screwing the customer over with every successful revision. If they really were that stupid and antipathetic towards the people paying the bills, I doubt they'd be the largest software company in the entire world.
It seems to me that a lot of other people have had similar ideas, and the results have all been built on top of X. GTK/Gnome and KDE being two popular examples. I admit that my understanding of what X Windows does is fairly limited, but as far as I know it just a very fast, well written program that draws shapes on your screen and coordinates mouse and keyboard input, all rolled up into a tight, clean client-server interface. I'm not even all that sure if X Windows knows about actual windows; I believe (and this is insightful) that that's handled by the "window manager." So I think when you talk about rewriting the interface, don't you really want to think more about building your own windowing environment on top of X?
Watch your mouth. It was the flourishing of modern economics post-1930s that saved your ass from another depression. Ever eaten grass for dinner before?
Please substantiate that claim. I'd especially like to know where you got the "two years" part. This implies than Win2k is either getting much more stable in the near future, which would be highly surprising as it is no longer in development, or that Linux will become much more crash prone in two years. Given Linus's extremely conservative mores when it comes to drastically altering the kernel, this, too, would come as a complete shock.
Also, you need to take a look at where Linux is selling and where it's not. 1/4 of all new servers last year shipped with Linux preinstalled. Redhat, by far the most succesful Linux distributor, focuses almost exclusively on high-end corporate sales, as do most others who are doing well. I'm sorry to say this, but your piddly Windows XP Home Edition "stability" does not count for squat in the eyes of any CIO. Hardware demands, throughput, speed, requisite stability -- the bar is set so much higher in a typical business environment than you, as a home user, could possibly fathom. It's estimated that eBay lost close to $10 million in cash when it went down for 22 hours last year. Would you bet $10 million dollars of your money on the stability of Windows XP? That's the level of assurance we're talking about here. And in this arena (at least from what I hear and read) the NT 5.0 kernel still can't hack it. Don't take my word for it, do a google search for "Active Directory Server stability" and see what comes up. So I would object when you say that "Linux vendors will have to come up with something better than stability to sell their distros." Perhaps in the home market this is true. But it's clear that, at least for the time being, any Linux vendor worth their salt isn't targeting just the home market. Even Mandrake.
Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious. I think his point was that it's a waste to spend all this money just to impress other people, when you can just spend it on things (like DP) that make you yourself happy. Which is something I totally agree with, and apparently you do as well.
Let's not forget that Roxio has agency in the matter, too. It's clear, given this lawsuit, that Roxio would have utterly annihilated Gracenote in court because a.) the suit was without merit and, b.) Roxio has the full faith and credit of Adaptec behind them, meaning that they can put probably ten times the legal resources on this case as puny little Gracenote. Thus, Gracenote obviously initiated the settlement and probably ended up paying a fair sum for the "privilege" of providing database access gratis to Roxio for quite some time. So Roxio's principalled stand is essentially bought off by some cash and stock. I'm not sure which bothers me more, that sellout or "hit and run prospecting" on our data.
There is? Like what? I am an electrical engineering/computer science major at one of the largest public universities in the US. We jokingly refer to our school as the "degree factory," but it's basically true. There is very little face to face interaction with professors here; in fact, I had literally none for all of last semester. The CS major is impacted beyond belief; my smallest CS class so far has been in the 450-500 range. My point is this: as far as I can tell there really isn't much more to CS than hacking and reading books. That's all I've done now for three years, and I am a very good programmer. This is not my ego speaking; this is what friends and coworkers have told me. Including, I might add, coworkers who were trained at small, cozy private schools and who probably had much more face time with the profs than I do. So my question is, what about CS cannot be learned from a book or by experimentation?
Often when I'm just casually browsing around the Internet I kind of lull through web pages and "half read" them, reading them without thinking about the words make sense. And my eyes suck from coding. This produces some funny results. Did anyone else read the headline to say,
"
Huge Bareass Discusses How Cisco Is Enabling High-Speed Performance Over Existing Wiring"
This is really fascinating, almost like a time capsule! Can you even imagine a time when everyone in the entire online world didn't know what an emoticon was?! Witness this extraordinary paragraph:
Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for
annotating one's messages to overcome this problem. If you turn
your head sideways to look at the three characters:-) they look
sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a
message that says "Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)" you
know they are joking. If they say "I need to talk to you:-(",
be prepared for trouble.
You read these phrases like, "A company called Microsoft," or "A new virus called AIDS"; what a throwback. Very cool!
Alright, so I'm lazy. Can someone please answer me this: is it possible yet for me to take my DivX;-) movies, turn them into VOB files, burn them, and play them in my DVD player? Last I checked the answer was an uncertain "no." Or, more accurately, I tried to figure this question once before and was unpleasantly surprised to discover the myriad of formats out there: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, blah blah. Every player seems to be incompatible with about half of them, but it's never the same half. So I assumed no. Has anything changed?
This is funny because it reminds me of an essay I just read by Andrew Ferguson which is completely, entirely apropos to this story. I quote from his book:
"My interest in [Bob] McNamara is intensified because he exemplifies a peculiar Washington phenomenon. In Washington people fail up. The city is exempt from the laws of professional gravity. No other city is so accommodating to failure, so friendly to the people who fail. Large awards await the bunglers and the bobblers, the has-beens and wannabees-who-never-could. Our present mayor, to cite an obvious example, destroyed the city's finances, smoked crack on TV, went to prison--and then got reelected... Here's The Iron-Contra bungler, awarded a popular radio show for his work destroying the Reagan administration. Over there is the manager of the 1992 Bush campaign, mulling offers from candidates to work his magic again in 1996. And over here is the chief strategist for Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis--why, he's the secretary of state!
"McNamara is the spiritual father of them all. He is the architect of a career breathtaking in the scope of its screwups, a clockwork progression of failure and reward, error and advancement. Imagine a friend who comes to visit. The first night he cooks you dinner and sets fire to the kitchen. The next morning he accidentally electrocutes the cat. He blows his nose in the curtains and never flushes the toilet. He borrows your car and drives through the garage door, then spreads a rare infection to your kids. By the third day you make the decision: You ask him to move in with you.
"This is the pattern of McNamara's career. At Ford Motors, in the late 1950s, he designed the sclerotic top-down management system that almost sank the American automobile industry; for good measure, he oversaw the production of the Edsel. Accordingly, JFK handed him the Pentagon. There McNamara got the idea for the Vietnam war--the Edsel of American foreign policy. So awed was the Washington establishment tthat it placed him at the head of the World Bank, in hopes that he might do for the international economy what he had done for the American military. And he did! Within ten years, he had doubled the amount of money loaned, and lost, to third world kleptocracies like Brazil and the Central African Empire. He was Midas in reverse. Wherever he draped his hand, industries wilted, economies collapsed, corpses piled up."
Looks like Howard Schmidt is the Bob McNamara of our day!
Now seems like an opportune time to remind everybody that the FastTrack protocol was reverse-engineered some months ago by these guys (definitely a highly impressive RE feat, IMHO). gIFT is a fully functional, open source FastTrack implementation which happily coexisted with Kazaa and Morpheus until FastTrack decided to break it by further obfuscating their protocol. Which is a shame, because in doing so they make the FastTrack protocol reliant on centrally run servers to obtain a cryptographic key... this is all covered in detail on the gIFT website. Long story short, Kazaa can go down in flames for all I care, even though I use it almost every day. gIFT is in the public domain and here to stay. It's not ever going to be taken away from us. It works like a charm. It's decentralized. And it's just waiting to load up on content so it can gain that critical mass of users needed for widespread acceptance. Kind of a chicken or the egg problem, I suppose. So my advice to everyone is to start running gIFT and develop OpenFT network. This sounds like bluster but it's true for the time being: gIFT is the be-all-end-all of P2P filesharing.
Run an OS with a real security model. Like Unix(TM). There are no virii and scant few worms for and Unix variant, to my knowledge. What would it take to install this sort of keylogger on Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.? Well, the ability to modify the kernel, if you want to do it right. You could always do it in userspace, but that's way obvious and would require root access or incredibly stupid users who don't notice an extra line in their.tcshrc file. So in other words, they'd have to root your box and/or probably physically remove the drive from the machine and toy with it before any sort of keylogging would take place. And this is before we bring encrypted filesystems into the equasion. A much larger undertaking than just attaching a rogue executable to some e-mail and waiting for the results to roll in.
For those of you enslaved to other, inferior operating systems, I say let the market work its magic. So Symantec and McAfee refuse to detect this virus, okay. Clearly there's a great demand for something that will. Read the posts on this very board, for pete's sake. So the chances of some enterprising coder coming up with something that will detect they keylogger is pretty good, I'd say.
OTOH, finding out exactly what the hell it looks like is pretty good. I'm sorry, paranoiacs, but the chances of this thing cropping up on Joe Public's computer seem pretty slim. You'd have to be associating with some rather sketchy people before you'd ever get a glimpse of this thing in action, it seems.
Re:Already discussed stupid hd buses w/ ATA133 sto
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 2
You're out of your mind. Here's a concrete example of FireWire being far better for mass storage than USB -- ever wonder why you can't find any USB CD-RWs that transfer faster than 4x? That's right, because the USB bus can't handle anything faster. Try for higher bandwidth, get coasters. This problem simply does not exist with FireWire. At up to 50MB/s (that's *bytes*, not bits), it won't for a long, long time. The throughput of pretty much every USB 1.0 device is bandwidth-limited by the bus, save the doofy little serial interfaces. That's why USB 2.0 is out. But I don't think I heard you say anything about that...
Everyone should take a peek at this article just to stare at these self-important CIO blowhards and their goofy pictures. Is this guy a jackass or what?
I would have to guess that a couple of large, corporate donors heard about plans afoot for mandatory key-escrow encryption and started making some phone calls. Don't forget that businesses need crypto too; they make tons and tons and tons of money from people who need to sleep well at night knowing that their data is safe. It's unfortunate but probably true, in fact, that the biggest users of digital encryption in this country aren't individuals at all, but businesses with data vaults and secure WANs to worry about. As key-escrow is apt to--nay, does--blow up in everyone's face the minute the backdoor key is discovered, I'm sure that backdoors made more than a few of the rich corporate fatcats who, let's face it, are calling the shots in this country, uneasy. A well-placed call here, and greased palm there, money everywhere... viola! no more backdoors anywhere.
Huh? Relatively speaking, their content is tops. Amongst all the internet search engines, I think you'll find that both anecdotally and empirically Google is tops. Granted, they're only indexing like 15% of the internet, but people tend not to care about that when everyone else only has ten.
Everybody who works on open source projects is churning out code. This one axiom pretty much explains every deficiency and advantage that OSS has. For example:
No user-friendly open-source GUIs. GNOME, for all its technical wizardry (and there is a lot), still does not even come close to the user-friendliness of Windows. KDE approaches Windows in usability a few ways, but let's remember how it got to that point: by copying Windows (hoo baby that flames are gonna come a'rolling in for this post, I can tell.) The "Start" menu, dockable taskbar apps, the integrated browser & file manager, alt-tabbing between programs -- don't forget where all those came from. The similiarities between KOffice, AbiSuite, StarOffice, and the grandaddy of them all, MS Office, are I think more than just a coincidence. Now, technically, the OSS GUIs available really pushing the envelope. KParts, Bonobo, Kio::Slave -- all of it just totally cool from a coder's point of view. But I've seen very little in the way usability innovation, which is what you'd expect from a development group made up only of people who already know the software like the back of their hand. The same could be said about documentation and graphics, as well; both (especially the former) lag way behind their commercial counterparts. Occasionally, you have someone like Raster or Mosfet come along, but they are exceptions to the rule.
No OSS games are anywhere near as cool their commercial counterparts. Well of course; it's no secret that games take artists, modellers, sound engineers, musicians, and writers in addition to people pumping out the code. Even John Carmack employs a small army of these people to make iD games, and he's about as close to a digital virtuoso as they come.
Most mature open-source software is better, faster, more stable, and more feature-laden than its closed source variant. The logical extension of what I have been saying all along. The people who contribute to open-source projects are all coders, and usually highly competent ones at that. Even if they are not, the peer-review process has proven itself infinitely more efficient at finding and quickly fixing bugs and adding new features than anything in the closed-source realm. Here's where your stock examples of how wonderful open source is come in: Sendmail, Apache, Linux, PHP, etc. etc.
Applications that require a significant investment in R&D will not be released as open source, and if they are, they will suck. We can write operating-systems and servers for pretty much every protocol on Earth as open-source because knowledge of how to do so is public domain. By contrast, there is no good OSS version of Lightwave or 3DSMAX because each respective company spent millions of dollars figuring out the best way to make their pictures look pretty, then probably patented the results. And don't save povray, because: 1.) It's not free (as in speech), 2.) it still lags way behind commercial raytracers, and 3.) it still does not have a decent, non-commercial GUI (cf. bullet #1). Nor blender, which was bought-and-paid-for by NaN before being released OSS. Obviously, this type of thing isn't just going to spontaneously happen when the bulk of contributors to an open-source project are coding, not researching. Like it or not, another example here would be Gnutella vs. FastTrack; the former, despite having more than a 1 year jump, still cannot compete with the latter, simply because FastTrack is a small group of guys paid to sit around all day and think of ways to optimize their network.
I could go on for days about this and I'm sure so could everyone else, but not I, too, have got some school work to do.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Let me say that, at least for me, this was not like debugging any of the userspace programs that I had done before. If you're like me, when your program crashes, you first up gdb, load the core, and backtrace/step from there. First of all, there's no core dump. In this case I didn't even have the luxury of an oops readout; as I would find out later this particular bug was locking the computer even before the kernel could flush its output buffers and print to the screen.
So I had to start meticulously reconstructing the function call stack using printk(). It took me awhile before I figured out why none of these were getting printed (for the reason I just mentioned.) So that didn't work either.
I searched high and low but never did find a way to debug the kernel that was as easy as using gdb to debug a userspace program, and that's not saying much. No stepping, no backtraces, nada. The "bug" in my particular driver consisted of a single offending line which wrote an 8-bit register and was not to spec. I would have never ferreted it out if I hadn't "stumbled" across the NDA'd specs myself.
Anyways, moral of the story: kernel debugging sucks for really hard bugs. If anyone knows of better tools to use kindly inform me of them.
We have had this in the UC Berkeley computer science department for some time now. IIRC it's been quite effective; when it was first unveiled it nailed many, many students for cheating (I think). The verdict amongst students is, if you're good enough to defeat the cheating detector then doing the assignment on your own should be no problem anyways.
About 10 years ago, or whenever HTML first emerged, I suppose you would have been right. But HTML seems to have quickly morphed into some odd mixture of presentation and markup. Did you ever wonder why and do the exact same thing (or and ?) One would suggest that HTML is a description language; the other, presentation. Don't even get me started about (which appears to have died the death it so deserved, finally, although it's still in the CSS 2.0 spec!) Particularly with MS having won the browser war in 96 or 97, we've seen literally years worth of proprietary "feature additions" to HTML that have absolutely nothing to do with describing the document and everything to do with governing presentation. If you want a good example, take a look at the atrocious code autogenerated by the MS Office apps. I still have nightmares about it. It tries to basically make the outputted page look identical to whatever you are seeing in Word or Excel, which I guess must make Joe User feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But there's just no way to do that without controlling aspects of presentation (and when you have the monopoly browser, I reckon that's pretty easy to do.)
Precisely. In fact, I'd go ever further and say that, if you spend a lot of time compiling, you should always forego getting the fastest processor and the market and buy 2 of whatever costs half the price, and build yourself an SMP box. First, the performance gain with SMP is basically linear for compilation, assuming you're using a good value for make -j. Second, it's been my experience that a pair of 700Mhz PIIIs usually beats my 1.5Ghz P4 handily for kernel compiles and many other things. Granted it's kind of comparing apples to oranges but it's a starting point.
It's a convenience feature. They are all interoperable. The way the format is set up, if Word 97 encounters something it doesn't recognize (like some formatting command or feature that got added in later) it just ignores it. So if you start using features in Word XP that weren't there before you have no guarantee that your document will look the same when it comes up on 2000 or 97. "Disable Word 97 features" gives you that assurance, if you want it. It's not required. In my experience, whether that's enabled or not, all the text and much of the formatting (e.g. the "gist" of the document) survives. I call that interoperable; you can niggle about rhetoric all you want.
Oh, and I've wrestled with this one for the past half hour and I still can't figure out what you mean when you say, "Their products seem easy to use, but they really aren't that easy." Could you please elaborate? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
I grant you that their security sucks, so I probably shouldn't call them "good" products. But in terms of ease-of-use, in terms of UI, they're far and away above all the competition with the exception of MacOS.
I think you've missed the point. There is no such thing as "Save As" Word 97 or "Save As" Word 2000 because it's all the same format. You can "Save As" Word 95, because that was that last version using a different format. Otherwise, they're all the same.
And by the way, you shouldn't be so quick to underestimate Microsoft's morals/motives. They're monopolistic and nosy and untrustworthy, granted, but they do make good products that are easy to use and featureful. It's naive to believe that they are into just screwing the customer over with every successful revision. If they really were that stupid and antipathetic towards the people paying the bills, I doubt they'd be the largest software company in the entire world.
It seems to me that a lot of other people have had similar ideas, and the results have all been built on top of X. GTK/Gnome and KDE being two popular examples. I admit that my understanding of what X Windows does is fairly limited, but as far as I know it just a very fast, well written program that draws shapes on your screen and coordinates mouse and keyboard input, all rolled up into a tight, clean client-server interface. I'm not even all that sure if X Windows knows about actual windows; I believe (and this is insightful) that that's handled by the "window manager." So I think when you talk about rewriting the interface, don't you really want to think more about building your own windowing environment on top of X?
Watch your mouth. It was the flourishing of modern economics post-1930s that saved your ass from another depression. Ever eaten grass for dinner before?
Also, you need to take a look at where Linux is selling and where it's not. 1/4 of all new servers last year shipped with Linux preinstalled. Redhat, by far the most succesful Linux distributor, focuses almost exclusively on high-end corporate sales, as do most others who are doing well. I'm sorry to say this, but your piddly Windows XP Home Edition "stability" does not count for squat in the eyes of any CIO. Hardware demands, throughput, speed, requisite stability -- the bar is set so much higher in a typical business environment than you, as a home user, could possibly fathom. It's estimated that eBay lost close to $10 million in cash when it went down for 22 hours last year. Would you bet $10 million dollars of your money on the stability of Windows XP? That's the level of assurance we're talking about here. And in this arena (at least from what I hear and read) the NT 5.0 kernel still can't hack it. Don't take my word for it, do a google search for "Active Directory Server stability" and see what comes up. So I would object when you say that "Linux vendors will have to come up with something better than stability to sell their distros." Perhaps in the home market this is true. But it's clear that, at least for the time being, any Linux vendor worth their salt isn't targeting just the home market. Even Mandrake.
Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious. I think his point was that it's a waste to spend all this money just to impress other people, when you can just spend it on things (like DP) that make you yourself happy. Which is something I totally agree with, and apparently you do as well.
Let's not forget that Roxio has agency in the matter, too. It's clear, given this lawsuit, that Roxio would have utterly annihilated Gracenote in court because a.) the suit was without merit and, b.) Roxio has the full faith and credit of Adaptec behind them, meaning that they can put probably ten times the legal resources on this case as puny little Gracenote. Thus, Gracenote obviously initiated the settlement and probably ended up paying a fair sum for the "privilege" of providing database access gratis to Roxio for quite some time. So Roxio's principalled stand is essentially bought off by some cash and stock. I'm not sure which bothers me more, that sellout or "hit and run prospecting" on our data.
There is? Like what? I am an electrical engineering/computer science major at one of the largest public universities in the US. We jokingly refer to our school as the "degree factory," but it's basically true. There is very little face to face interaction with professors here; in fact, I had literally none for all of last semester. The CS major is impacted beyond belief; my smallest CS class so far has been in the 450-500 range. My point is this: as far as I can tell there really isn't much more to CS than hacking and reading books. That's all I've done now for three years, and I am a very good programmer. This is not my ego speaking; this is what friends and coworkers have told me. Including, I might add, coworkers who were trained at small, cozy private schools and who probably had much more face time with the profs than I do. So my question is, what about CS cannot be learned from a book or by experimentation?
Alright, so I'm lazy. Can someone please answer me this: is it possible yet for me to take my DivX ;-) movies, turn them into VOB files, burn them, and play them in my DVD player? Last I checked the answer was an uncertain "no." Or, more accurately, I tried to figure this question once before and was unpleasantly surprised to discover the myriad of formats out there: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW, blah blah. Every player seems to be incompatible with about half of them, but it's never the same half. So I assumed no. Has anything changed?
Now seems like an opportune time to remind everybody that the FastTrack protocol was reverse-engineered some months ago by these guys (definitely a highly impressive RE feat, IMHO). gIFT is a fully functional, open source FastTrack implementation which happily coexisted with Kazaa and Morpheus until FastTrack decided to break it by further obfuscating their protocol. Which is a shame, because in doing so they make the FastTrack protocol reliant on centrally run servers to obtain a cryptographic key... this is all covered in detail on the gIFT website. Long story short, Kazaa can go down in flames for all I care, even though I use it almost every day. gIFT is in the public domain and here to stay. It's not ever going to be taken away from us. It works like a charm. It's decentralized. And it's just waiting to load up on content so it can gain that critical mass of users needed for widespread acceptance. Kind of a chicken or the egg problem, I suppose. So my advice to everyone is to start running gIFT and develop OpenFT network. This sounds like bluster but it's true for the time being: gIFT is the be-all-end-all of P2P filesharing.
OTOH, finding out exactly what the hell it looks like is pretty good. I'm sorry, paranoiacs, but the chances of this thing cropping up on Joe Public's computer seem pretty slim. You'd have to be associating with some rather sketchy people before you'd ever get a glimpse of this thing in action, it seems.
You're out of your mind. Here's a concrete example of FireWire being far better for mass storage than USB -- ever wonder why you can't find any USB CD-RWs that transfer faster than 4x? That's right, because the USB bus can't handle anything faster. Try for higher bandwidth, get coasters. This problem simply does not exist with FireWire. At up to 50MB/s (that's *bytes*, not bits), it won't for a long, long time. The throughput of pretty much every USB 1.0 device is bandwidth-limited by the bus, save the doofy little serial interfaces. That's why USB 2.0 is out. But I don't think I heard you say anything about that...
Everyone should take a peek at this article just to stare at these self-important CIO blowhards and their goofy pictures. Is this guy a jackass or what?
I would have to guess that a couple of large, corporate donors heard about plans afoot for mandatory key-escrow encryption and started making some phone calls. Don't forget that businesses need crypto too; they make tons and tons and tons of money from people who need to sleep well at night knowing that their data is safe. It's unfortunate but probably true, in fact, that the biggest users of digital encryption in this country aren't individuals at all, but businesses with data vaults and secure WANs to worry about. As key-escrow is apt to--nay, does--blow up in everyone's face the minute the backdoor key is discovered, I'm sure that backdoors made more than a few of the rich corporate fatcats who, let's face it, are calling the shots in this country, uneasy. A well-placed call here, and greased palm there, money everywhere... viola! no more backdoors anywhere.
Huh? Relatively speaking, their content is tops. Amongst all the internet search engines, I think you'll find that both anecdotally and empirically Google is tops. Granted, they're only indexing like 15% of the internet, but people tend not to care about that when everyone else only has ten.
I could go on for days about this and I'm sure so could everyone else, but not I, too, have got some school work to do.