Not that anyone's ever going to see this, but I can't let it stand...
No, I wasn't "blaming" him. I was accusing him of exaggerating the badness of the UI by pretending not to see the obvious. You accuse me of saying "No, it's not a bad design. It's perfect, and if you don't get it that's your fault." What I actually meant (and I thought I said it pretty clearly) was "Yeah, yeah, okay, it could be a bit more elegant, but (I assert) it's not that confusing; hence, I have trouble believing that you were really that confused, and I can't help but suspect that your eagerness to find things to make fun of led you to exaggerate."
By the way, I can't say I've ever heard that particular claim from even the most fundamentalist of Christians (or any other religion), even if the faulty implicit premise is evident in their "logic" and in their inability to see the circularity of the "God says, in the Bible, that you must believe what's written in the Bible" argument.
What if Congress could some how interpret writing GPL code as a taxable activity?
The exact opposite seems more likely: it should be considered a tax-deductible activity. Imagine if you could put a dollar value on the work that you contribute to Open/Free software projects and claim that as a charitable contribution on what is now my new favorite IRS document -- your Schedule A. (*) Think: why do we call it "contributing"? Because you're giving the fruits of your labor to society (or more concretely, depending on the project, donating your time to some non-profit organization).
Okay, but it's a nice fantasy, right?
Actually, I know I'm not the first to think of it. I don't know what the reality might be, but the idea has come up before. It would also be a nice incentive for companies to contribute development resources, or maybe even to open-source existing (or at least old "abandonware") products.
(*) Itemized deductions. 2001 was my first full year as a mortgage payer and the amount that that takes out of your taxable income was a pleasant shock.
he real problem is that there is no way for the SSSCA requirements to be met without trusted hardware that will only load a trusted O/S. Trusted in this context means 'RIAA approved'. There is no way that Linux could meet that criteria.
Just in case this needs extra clarification: these protection schemes rely on "trusted clients" (which is the motivation for the bill in the first place -- outlaw all untrusted clients), meaning that you have to be able to count on a piece of the user's equipment (hardware, software, or whatever) to obey the rules, not because it has to, but because it agrees to (or, rather, its manufacturer agrees to make it function that way).
It's not that a regular Region 1 DVD player doesn't know how to play a Region 2 DVD; it just refuses to do so. The discs are encoded the same way, so the player's circuitry is capable of decoding it; it's just that the format includes a message that politely asks "please don't play me unless..." and the control logic is set up to respect this. (Unless the player was built by one of the terrorist organizations that are trying to destroy American society by making noncompliant players, but for theoretical purposes those don't count.)
The problem with Free/Open software meeting the criteria is that no piece of software for which the source is readily available can ever possibly be a "trusted client", since any user could modify the program to disable the protection mechanism (probably by commenting out a single line, but in any case, it would almost surely be trivially easy).
I believe that's the best way to phrase it. Honestly, I'm not claiming that it's perfectly clear, but it never occurred to me to not get the lock icon thing. Sure, maybe it's bad UI design. Maybe one could even use it (along with so many other things in MOSX) as ammo for a philosophical argument about Object-Oriented Programming encouraging too much reuse, leading to special cases for important little details being smoothed over in the name of streamlining, even when a miswart would be appropriate.
But if he's honestly claiming that he couldn't figure out that the dialog wanted him to re-enter his password, that the closed lock icon at the bottom was an indication that the dialog was locked, and that the solution might have something to do with the "Click Me" label next to the lock... Sorry, I don't buy it. I wonder if he's yet come across a panel where, instead of the "You need an administrator name and password" text, the controls are shown but grayed out -- Andrew, if you're reading this: even though the text isn't there, the way to activate the controls is to click the lock and enter your password.
"Hmm, it says I need an admin password. There's even a little padlock icon showing that the dialog is protected. Nice window dressing, that. But where do I enter my password? The padlock's label says "Click Me", but that can't be it... Better go to System Preferences and create a new user..." Sorry, that can only be deliberate obtusity.
I don't think it's really that hard to grasp the idiom here: any panel that controls actions that require authentication has that lock, and you open it by clicking it and authenticating yourself. If you're logged in as an admin user, you can just enter your password; otherwise, if you know an admin username/password, you can enter that. Maybe the "Click the lock to make changes" text is too generic and should be customized for the specific function of each panel, and maybe the entry field should even be built into the panels (the miswart I mentioned), but is it really, honestly, that confusing?
However, his next gripe about "The item 'guest Deleted' cannot be moved to the Trash because it cannot be deleted." is completely and totally RIGHT! In fact, it's only one symptom of the syndrome that is, to me, MOSX's greatest failing: integrating and merging the metaphors and mechanisms used on the Mac side and the Unix side so that they can work together seamlessly. There are so many bugs in this area, with components not adequately aware of things like Unix permissions <=> the old Mac "locked" bit, old Mac aliases <=> Unix links, and don't even get me started on file types (too late: Couldn't they have at least made files created by Unix tools default to Mac type 'TEXT'? Then I could, for example, edit a file in Emacs and still be able to open it with CodeWarrior).
A gun fight where everyone gets to fire off hundreds of rounds is much cooler than one in which everyone has one magazine and that's it.
Yeah, but adding little touches like the logistics of occasionally needing to crouch behind something to change clips can greatly increase the coolness, drama, and overall fun of a well-choreographed gun fight.
Conversely, a chase sequence where:
- the bad guy's gun is specifically shown to be a revolver (usually taken from a cop)
- he fires at least fifteen wild shots in a few drawn-out action scenes before getting the good guy backed into a corner at point-blank range
- the action stops while he points the gun dramatically and the good guy cringes in fear
- he (slowly and deliberately) pulls the trigger, and...
-...
- "click."
Right, the performance hit for emulation would make it excruciating, except -- the idea here is that only the higher-level code (the {"Mac OS X" - Darwin} set of Apple binaries, plus user-level applications) would be emulated; low-level system stuff (the kernel's I/O, VM, and other hardware-access, the BSD layer, and whatever other services are included in Darwin) would run natively.
The question becomes: for real-world everyday use, how much time is spent in those system calls vs. executing user code? If user processes are spending most of their time waiting on I/O or other system calls anyway, then slower execution of user code wouldn't hurt so much as long as the system calls remain native. Could the overall performance be expected to come anywhere close to a level where it would be worth anyone's trouble to implement?
I guess a major decider would be Quartz: how much of the drawing engine is actually in those PPC binaries? If all the actual pixel-pushing is in there, then emulating it would be extreme pain, but if it's mostly control logic passing hardware calls down to the graphics card, then maybe it could be reasonable.
Only the Darwin layer interacts with the hardware, all the other layers interact with the Darwin kernel (that's one point of having a kernel). So Aqua cannot "know" if the motherboard is genuine Apple or not.
I've been wondering just how true this is -- I understand that this is the architectural idea, but the truth could have been anywhere between:
* "because the dependencies are minimized, it would be very easy for Apple, if they so chose, (has to be them, since the higher layers are not open-source) to modify the code to enable the higher layers to run", and
* "the abstraction really is complete, so that with the right hardware-enabling kernel extensions (which anyone can do, since the kernel is open-source), you can literally run unmodified Apple binaries and third-party applications".
I guess you, and the page you linked to, are saying that it's the latter, which is really good news, and which I've only doubted out of general cynicism. Now for an even more ambitious question:
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel [only (?)] because the available binary code is PPC code.
If this is really true, and the CPU is the only reason (i.e., the other differences between the platforms are not too big to be abstracted beneath the Darwin layer), then would it be theoretically possible to hack a PowerPC emulation engine into Darwin/Intel, such that all the higher level code could be run through the emulator? I'm talking about integrating it at the kernel level, so that PPC binaries could be run in a "wrapper process" that would pass their code through the emulator, translate their API calls to the appropriate format before passing them to the kernel, etc.
This kind of architecture independence is an idea that's been kicked around in a variety of contexts, with different pros and cons, but this seems like it could be a promising one, with Darwin/Intel bringing it to the "almost-there" level, and the lure of Mac OS X running on x86 boxes. Any chance?
Just because you like SGI's policies better than Microsoft's policies does not invalidate the right of ownership
No, that doesn't invalidate it, assuming you believe that the "right of ownership" of knowledge was ever valid in the first place. However, if you've believed all along that the very concept that it's possible in any sense to "own" knowledge, information, and ideas was bad, dangerous, and destructive, then this is just one more reason why.
So my reasons for windows over linux? It's simply that I'm afraid of the transition, and of messing up my computer.
Well, if you're that interested, but not quite ready to commit totally, you could get another computer so you can run both systems side by side. Assuming that's not an option (for reasons of cost, desk space, or just not being geeky enough), you could do what a friend of mine does: get another hard drive. Don't even think about messing with partitions, just install on a second drive and keep the two systems completely separate.
Put both drives in your case, but only connect one at a time. When you want to switch between systems, shut the machine down, pull the ribbon cable off the one drive, and plug it into the other. This is basically an extension of the advice above -- you're completely safe from "seeing the power of the -R flag in action when you least expect it". How could you possibly mess up your Windows stuff through any mistake you make in the Linux environment? The drive is not even physically connected to the computer at the time!
I don't know how your case is designed, but my friend's boxes have reversible drive bays, so for maximum convenience he can put the drives in backward with the cable connectors facing the front. Then he can switch the cables by just pulling off the front plastic bezels and reaching in -- no need to fully open the case.
Sorry, but there's nothing in the constitution preventing Congress to pass [un]constitutional laws.
How about all those sentences that begin with "Congress shall make no law..."? To my non-lawyer's ear at least, that sounds like a pretty explicit statement that it is illegal for Congress to make such a law. (I just said the same thing twice, didn't I?) It seems that when Congress does make such a law, they are committing a crime: it says they shall not do it ==> they did it ==> they broke the law. Right?
I just wish it included some provision for punishment of those who violate the supreme law of the land. Maybe your point would be better stated as "There is no incentive for Congress to pay any attention to the Constitution, since othing bad happens to them when they violate it."
You know, that's starting to sound like a really good analogy, even if it runs the risk of invoking a modified Godwin's Law (i.e., by making such an outrageous accusation, you officially lower the discussion to the level of flaming, so you lose).
I think it was here on slashdot that someone posted what I believe is a quote from "Alpha Centauri" (I never played the game, so I only know what I saw here). Ahem:
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free access to information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information will soon burst with freedom and vitality, while the free nation gradually constricting its grip on free discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Uhm...there's no difference between analog and digital media here, except that digital media is way easier to copy.
The underlying theme of the "it was OK for analog, but casual copying has no place in digital" argument that is common in the entertainment industry is really "with digital media, casual copying actually threatens my profits, so I'm against it".
Can I assume that those responsible have been sacked?
Again, like I said, of course it's kind of nitpicky, but I do think it's pretty important to keep things straight when arguing a position and this one is sort of a pet peeve (like the local crypto experts who keep talking about factoring prime numbers); I didn't mean to pick on you, but I've seen it enough times that it was getting embarrassing.
Regardless of your feelings about DeCSS (I'm for it), the RIAA did a very good job of picking a target when they picked 2600 Magazine.
It's starting to scare the hell out of me, frankly, that even those of us who have insightful, reasoned, well-thought-out things to say (and sub-five-digit UIDs) can't keep the RIAA and the MPAA straight. I mean, sure they're all the same evil mega-corporate enemies of freedom and everything, but I don't recall the Recording Industry suing 2600 over the copy-protection of Motion Pictures.
What makes it so scary is wondering, if we can't even remember the names of the organizations that we're talking about, then do we really understand what's going on as well as we'd like to think we do?
Yeah, I know it's just a silly mistake, but come on.
That said, I'm totally with you on the point about how "they'll pick the ugliest targets, and try them for who they are, not what they've done, merrily building up precedents here and case law there." Very nicely worded, and an important point to which more attention needs to be drawn -- I thought the implicit acceptance of this way of doing things was the most mystifying thing about the rejection of Felten's case.
but they also have to be forwarded to the judge- who is legally required to consider the public interest when approving the decision.
What I always wonder is, in a context like this, what exactly does "consider" mean? It obviously can't mean that the decision has to be entirely determined by the feedback, since that's what the judge is for, but then how much discretion does the judge have? Is there some kind of standard for how much weight should be given to such things? Is there any protection against the judge satisfying the requirement by simply saying "Okay, I considered it."?
When you were a kid asking your parents for some new toy, how much difference did it really make whether they said "No." or "Hmm. Lemme think about it. No."?
Did I just write a post in which every unquoted sentence is a question?
Hmmm.... slashdot still can't handle "greater than" and "less than" in plain text mode.
Hmmm.... some of us still haven't figured out what Slashdot's posting modes mean, so I'll say it again: the trick is that the names of the modes are sort of "backwards" with respect to their meanings, but there's a logical reason for it, and if you think about it for a couple of minutes you'll stop being confused.
Here's the big secret: the names of the modes refer to the way the text you type in the box will be inserted into the HTML source for the page, NOT the way the text will be displayed in the browser. Think about the HTML document that is being built -- do you want your text inserted directly into the HTML source, or do you want some translation applied to it first?
Hence, "Plain Old Text" means that what I type in the box just gets pasted directly into the document with no pre-processing (*1) so any tags I type will be interpreted as such and the text will be displayed accordingly -- of course this also means that it eats your "<" sign unless you're clever and use the "<" escape sequence.
This is the exact opposite of the text being displayed "plain" with markup ignored, which seems to be what so many people expect it to mean -- that's actually what the other modes do. I don't know or care exactly what the difference between them is, but "HTML Formatted" does some translation, and "Extrans" translates even more aggressively. The rationale is that here the text is formatted into suitable HTML so it can be displayed as you typed it.
I prefer "Plain Old Text" because it lets me both type tags directly if I want to use them to adorn my text and use escapes if I want to display a tag instead of its effect, or display special characters.
*1 Except that it adds a "<BR>" wherever I hit "Enter", because it's "obvious" that I'd want that. Also, I guess it strips out non-permitted tags that would do something harmful to the resulting document, like a </TABLE> for example.
All this talk you hear of 'protecting children' is really about adult discomfort.
I remember as a teenager frequently going to the video store with my sister (four years younger) to pick out a movie for the family to watch. A lot of times, when considering some title, we'd ask each other "Do you think Mom's old enough to see this?"
It was a joke, of course. For one thing, in our case the answer was generally yes. And it wasn't really a matter of us being presumptuous enough to think we were so much more mature than our parents. It was more about [humorously expressing] a concern over the awkwardness and discomfort of watching certain things with them sitting on the same couch.
And it was uncomfortable sometimes (mostly because of strong language and, to a lesser degree, violence -- we tended to voluntarily steer clear of excessive sexual content for exactly these reasons). But a little discomfort is no reason to forego the valuable family activity of watching those movies together. Plus, my sister and I were even more liberal in recommending movies to our parents to watch separately, and vice versa.
I would suggest you check out this link.
Sorry, not from the office. I assume it contains stuff that you predict "even I" would find offensive? I doubt it, and not because I'm trying to "out-pervert" you -- I might very well find it excessive, uncomfortable, distasteful, or even disturbing, but I claim to be above being offended by anything of the sort.
Is it just me, or do you feel like you're being talked down to by the media?
The media, the government, the activists / would-be "morality cops",... It's not really clear who's most to blame. Society's overall attitudes seem to be suffering from a combination of intellectual laziness, (some) people's immaturity and "fear of cooties", politicians' willingness to exploit that through "sound-bite wars" at the exclusion of genuine dialogue, and media's readiness to stir things up in the interest of sensationalism.
By the way, in my previous comment I deliberately avoided mentioning the possibilities of other ulterior political motives since, though valid, that would have detracted from my main point. As in, "...and don't even get me started on how this is all really a malicious power grab aimed at undermining our freedoms, thinly veiled with 'protect the children' rhetoric to help push it through..."
I just have trouble comprehending the small-mindedness that could make anyone (let alone enough people to give it this sort of political critical mass) fall for any of it. Cooties, indeed.
Lately I've been getting the impression that overzealous censorship like this is an adult manifestation of fear of cooties.
That's a beautiful sentence, and it needs to get some seriously wide exposure. It manages to convey the perfect sense of contempt that is the only fitting response to the "morality" brigade's attitudes.
As I recall, through a lot of these discussions, e.g., on some of the reports from town-hall meetings regarding library-censorship proposals, a lot of us have been frustrated with trying to articulate this. Not just pointing out how unworkable censorware is from a technical standpoint (true, but reducing the argument that far is granting too much). Not even just arguing for the importance of freedom (also a vitally important argument to make, of course). But attacking the fundamental immaturity of attitudes that lies behind all of their motives.
Why would they even want to do this? Even assuming it were technically possible (which it isn't), and granting that it were important enough to justify giving up so much freedom (which I don't) -- what kind of priorities does this indicate? Why, given all the really horrible things things in the world to which kids' "fragile litle minds" are exposed, not to even get started on the things that threaten them physically, would parents choose this to focus so much attention on?
I can only think that it's because the parents aren't really grown up themselves in terms of being comfortable with sexuality, and they can't even begin to contemplate it for their kids. They live in absolute dread of the day they'll have to give the "birds and bees" talk and will lash out at anything that threatens to hasten that day.
Maybe this kind of ridicule -- attributing the censors' fears to a failure to outgrow something as childish as "fear of cooties" -- could be an effective way to drive the point across in a pulic forum.
You should also try and figure out a way to get your page posted someplace where it'll be seen by about a quarter-million geeks who've been dreaming of something like this for at least ten years.
Seriously, at $1500 a pop, limited to 320x240 greyscale, and with a 2-month waiting list (and that was presumably before today), I'd guess that you're not quite at the point where every single one of us will buy one, but even so, you probably did just secure at least a few orders. (It'd be interesting if you'd post back in a few days with the results.) The sweet spot would probably be if you could hit 640x480 and at least 8-bit color without going too far over $600.
Still, this is already pretty nice -- I'd call myself "tempted", but not quite "seriously tempted", as it is; definitely interested enough to keep an eye on your progress. The price point is probably more important than the features: I'd be more likely to buy it as it is if you got the price down than at the current price if you got the features up.
I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster
But what if your total workload is small enough to be handled by a single box? If, as the article states, such functions as mail, print, and file serving need to be handled by separate dedicated machines for reasons of stability, not performance, then that puts a lower bound on the number of servers you need to have ([#server machines] >= [# server applications] -- and presumably database and web serving would be boxes #4 and #5), no matter how small the total workload actually is.
That would seem to significantly raise the entry-level price point for small shops whose total workload would otherwise be nowhere near the capacity of even a single box.
Look at distributed.net CPU speed tables. The fasted risc CPU of any kind (UltrasparcIII @ 800Mhz) is less than half the speed of a Pentium III doing 1.2Ghz (for RC5 cracking).
Hey, check your facts before making broad statements like "Sparcs are slow at RC5, so Intels are better". Somewhere in the distributed.net docs is stated that most RISC CPUs lacks an important assembly instruction (n-bit rotations, if I remember correctly), as opposed to x86 and PowerPC.
You're right about the meaninglessness of d.net RC5 as a general benchmark, but let's talk about it a bit anyway, speaking of PowerPC, which I can't imagine why one wouldn't "count" as a RISC CPU (at_18 mentioned it but Jon Peterson ignored it completely). Anyway, it flies on RC5. On G3s, their Mac clients tend to score a Kkeys/sec number that is about triple the MHz of the CPU, or about 330 cycles per key. On x86 machines that I've seen, the Kkeys/sec number was about double the MHz, making 500 cycles/key. On my G3/466 Powerbook, their v2.8010-463 client for Mac OS X is currently putting away 1.54 Mkeys/sec, which I guess is comaprable to what you'd get from a 750 MHz x86. And it runs cool enough that I can leave it on and crunching around the clock. Would you want to do that with an Intel laptop, with all the power-saving options turned off to keep it running at full speed?
And that's not even mentioning the G4's vector unit: nobody seems to really agree on just how much real-world applicability AltiVec will end up having, but for what it's worth, RC5 is a pretty spectacular one. My G4/400 gets over 3.2 Mkeys/sec, or four times more than an x86, clock for clock.
Making it a crime to crack that technology [...] is to delegate lawmaking to code writers.
This is one of the most crucial points to make. The DMCA doesn't just make new (more restrictive) rules on what uses of copyrighted material are legal -- it delegates the ability to make such rules to the publishers. By criminalizing circumvention of access controls, it gives the force of law to whatever restrictions the publisher sees fit to put in place. In effect, it gives the publisher legislative power -- the ability to decide what is or isn't legal. Making corporations part of the government hardly seems appropriate.
Two other important points about the DMCA as I understand it: one is that, while it does make an exception for "fair use", that applies only to the circumvention clause, not the distribution-of-circumvention-devices one. The problem is that, since breaking an access control is beyond the abilities of all but a very few people, the effect is the same. Also, the fact that it talks about measures that "control access", instead of "prevent copying", allows the restrictions to extend into every aspect of the manner in which one enjoys the product -- what kind of stereo, CD/DVD player, or TV set you can use to play it, where you can do so, what parts you can fast-forward through, etc., which has nothing to do with copying, but does create new revenue opportunities for publishers.
Here's a new one: suppose a publisher wanted to make a book that I could only read while sitting in an armchair, not while lying in bed -- say they print it on some special high-tech paper that would turn dark when held at an upright angle. They might want to charge me extra for the ability to read in bed, or they might for some unfathomable reason simply want to insist that I can only read the book while sitting up. The DMCA would give even this the force of law! I would not be allowed to cicumvent it -- or rather, I could, but then I would not be allowed to tell anyone else how I did it, and if it was so difficult that only a handful of people could do it, then the rest of us would be bound by it. How can this be?
This is what really annoys me. The record labels say that most of your money goes towards the rights to listen to a CD, but when you already own the rights to listen to a CD and simply need to replace the physical disc most of them force you to purchase the rights again in order to get the physical disc. I had a few CD's damaged a couple years back and asked the record labels how to get a cheap replacement disc since I already paid them for the rights to the music, and all of them except for one told me I would have to buy the CD from the store again
No, you don't understand: it's not one or the other -- whether what you paid for is ownership of the physical disc or a license to listen to it depends entirely on what right you're trying to exercise at the moment. I'll try to clarify:
If you want to justify some unconventional use of the disc by claiming that you own it and can do with it as you please, then the answer is that the piece of plastic is not important -- it's the information stored on it that matters, and to that you've only been granted a license, not ownership, and such uses are not allowed.
If on the other hand you want to use the license in some abstract sense to justify moving beyond the limitations of the physical disc, e.g., by making copies to keep in different places (home, car, office, etc.), converting to MP3, streaming the content from my.mp3.com, or demanding a new copy when the old one gets damaged, then the answer is that there's nothing special about the license -- the CD is a physical product that you buy and if you did those other things, you'd be stealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that anyone's ever going to see this, but I can't let it stand...
No, I wasn't "blaming" him. I was accusing him of exaggerating the badness of the UI by pretending not to see the obvious. You accuse me of saying "No, it's not a bad design. It's perfect, and if you don't get it that's your fault." What I actually meant (and I thought I said it pretty clearly) was "Yeah, yeah, okay, it could be a bit more elegant, but (I assert) it's not that confusing; hence, I have trouble believing that you were really that confused, and I can't help but suspect that your eagerness to find things to make fun of led you to exaggerate."
By the way, I can't say I've ever heard that particular claim from even the most fundamentalist of Christians (or any other religion), even if the faulty implicit premise is evident in their "logic" and in their inability to see the circularity of the "God says, in the Bible, that you must believe what's written in the Bible" argument.
Right now I'd settle for a nice game of tic-tac-toe.
What if Congress could some how interpret writing GPL code as a taxable activity?
The exact opposite seems more likely: it should be considered a tax-deductible activity. Imagine if you could put a dollar value on the work that you contribute to Open/Free software projects and claim that as a charitable contribution on what is now my new favorite IRS document -- your Schedule A. (*) Think: why do we call it "contributing"? Because you're giving the fruits of your labor to society (or more concretely, depending on the project, donating your time to some non-profit organization).
Okay, but it's a nice fantasy, right?
Actually, I know I'm not the first to think of it. I don't know what the reality might be, but the idea has come up before. It would also be a nice incentive for companies to contribute development resources, or maybe even to open-source existing (or at least old "abandonware") products.
(*) Itemized deductions. 2001 was my first full year as a mortgage payer and the amount that that takes out of your taxable income was a pleasant shock.
he real problem is that there is no way for the SSSCA requirements to be met without trusted hardware that will only load a trusted O/S. Trusted in this context means 'RIAA approved'. There is no way that Linux could meet that criteria.
Just in case this needs extra clarification: these protection schemes rely on "trusted clients" (which is the motivation for the bill in the first place -- outlaw all untrusted clients), meaning that you have to be able to count on a piece of the user's equipment (hardware, software, or whatever) to obey the rules, not because it has to, but because it agrees to (or, rather, its manufacturer agrees to make it function that way).
It's not that a regular Region 1 DVD player doesn't know how to play a Region 2 DVD; it just refuses to do so. The discs are encoded the same way, so the player's circuitry is capable of decoding it; it's just that the format includes a message that politely asks "please don't play me unless
The problem with Free/Open software meeting the criteria is that no piece of software for which the source is readily available can ever possibly be a "trusted client", since any user could modify the program to disable the protection mechanism (probably by commenting out a single line, but in any case, it would almost surely be trivially easy).
"Bad design or stupid user?"
Or, "Wiseass user being deliberately obtuse"?
I believe that's the best way to phrase it. Honestly, I'm not claiming that it's perfectly clear, but it never occurred to me to not get the lock icon thing. Sure, maybe it's bad UI design. Maybe one could even use it (along with so many other things in MOSX) as ammo for a philosophical argument about Object-Oriented Programming encouraging too much reuse, leading to special cases for important little details being smoothed over in the name of streamlining, even when a miswart would be appropriate.
But if he's honestly claiming that he couldn't figure out that the dialog wanted him to re-enter his password, that the closed lock icon at the bottom was an indication that the dialog was locked, and that the solution might have something to do with the "Click Me" label next to the lock... Sorry, I don't buy it. I wonder if he's yet come across a panel where, instead of the "You need an administrator name and password" text, the controls are shown but grayed out -- Andrew, if you're reading this: even though the text isn't there, the way to activate the controls is to click the lock and enter your password.
"Hmm, it says I need an admin password. There's even a little padlock icon showing that the dialog is protected. Nice window dressing, that. But where do I enter my password? The padlock's label says "Click Me", but that can't be it... Better go to System Preferences and create a new user..." Sorry, that can only be deliberate obtusity.
I don't think it's really that hard to grasp the idiom here: any panel that controls actions that require authentication has that lock, and you open it by clicking it and authenticating yourself. If you're logged in as an admin user, you can just enter your password; otherwise, if you know an admin username/password, you can enter that. Maybe the "Click the lock to make changes" text is too generic and should be customized for the specific function of each panel, and maybe the entry field should even be built into the panels (the miswart I mentioned), but is it really, honestly, that confusing?
However, his next gripe about "The item 'guest Deleted' cannot be moved to the Trash because it cannot be deleted." is completely and totally RIGHT! In fact, it's only one symptom of the syndrome that is, to me, MOSX's greatest failing: integrating and merging the metaphors and mechanisms used on the Mac side and the Unix side so that they can work together seamlessly. There are so many bugs in this area, with components not adequately aware of things like Unix permissions <=> the old Mac "locked" bit, old Mac aliases <=> Unix links, and don't even get me started on file types (too late: Couldn't they have at least made files created by Unix tools default to Mac type 'TEXT'? Then I could, for example, edit a file in Emacs and still be able to open it with CodeWarrior).
A gun fight where everyone gets to fire off hundreds of rounds is much cooler than one in which everyone has one magazine and that's it.
Yeah, but adding little touches like the logistics of occasionally needing to crouch behind something to change clips can greatly increase the coolness, drama, and overall fun of a well-choreographed gun fight.
Conversely, a chase sequence where:
- the bad guy's gun is specifically shown to be a revolver (usually taken from a cop)
- he fires at least fifteen wild shots in a few drawn-out action scenes before getting the good guy backed into a corner at point-blank range
- the action stops while he points the gun dramatically and the good guy cringes in fear
- he (slowly and deliberately) pulls the trigger, and...
-
- "click."
is no fun at all.
Right, the performance hit for emulation would make it excruciating, except -- the idea here is that only the higher-level code (the {"Mac OS X" - Darwin} set of Apple binaries, plus user-level applications) would be emulated; low-level system stuff (the kernel's I/O, VM, and other hardware-access, the BSD layer, and whatever other services are included in Darwin) would run natively.
The question becomes: for real-world everyday use, how much time is spent in those system calls vs. executing user code? If user processes are spending most of their time waiting on I/O or other system calls anyway, then slower execution of user code wouldn't hurt so much as long as the system calls remain native. Could the overall performance be expected to come anywhere close to a level where it would be worth anyone's trouble to implement?
I guess a major decider would be Quartz: how much of the drawing engine is actually in those PPC binaries? If all the actual pixel-pushing is in there, then emulating it would be extreme pain, but if it's mostly control logic passing hardware calls down to the graphics card, then maybe it could be reasonable.
Only the Darwin layer interacts with the hardware, all the other layers interact with the Darwin kernel (that's one point of having a kernel). So Aqua cannot "know" if the motherboard is genuine Apple or not.
I've been wondering just how true this is -- I understand that this is the architectural idea, but the truth could have been anywhere between:
* "because the dependencies are minimized, it would be very easy for Apple, if they so chose, (has to be them, since the higher layers are not open-source) to modify the code to enable the higher layers to run", and
* "the abstraction really is complete, so that with the right hardware-enabling kernel extensions (which anyone can do, since the kernel is open-source), you can literally run unmodified Apple binaries and third-party applications".
I guess you, and the page you linked to, are saying that it's the latter, which is really good news, and which I've only doubted out of general cynicism. Now for an even more ambitious question:
The high-level components like Cocoa and Carbon don't run on Darwin/Intel [only (?)] because the available binary code is PPC code.
If this is really true, and the CPU is the only reason (i.e., the other differences between the platforms are not too big to be abstracted beneath the Darwin layer), then would it be theoretically possible to hack a PowerPC emulation engine into Darwin/Intel, such that all the higher level code could be run through the emulator? I'm talking about integrating it at the kernel level, so that PPC binaries could be run in a "wrapper process" that would pass their code through the emulator, translate their API calls to the appropriate format before passing them to the kernel, etc.
This kind of architecture independence is an idea that's been kicked around in a variety of contexts, with different pros and cons, but this seems like it could be a promising one, with Darwin/Intel bringing it to the "almost-there" level, and the lure of Mac OS X running on x86 boxes. Any chance?
Just because you like SGI's policies better than Microsoft's policies does not invalidate the right of ownership
No, that doesn't invalidate it, assuming you believe that the "right of ownership" of knowledge was ever valid in the first place. However, if you've believed all along that the very concept that it's possible in any sense to "own" knowledge, information, and ideas was bad, dangerous, and destructive, then this is just one more reason why.
So my reasons for windows over linux? It's simply that I'm afraid of the transition, and of messing up my computer.
Well, if you're that interested, but not quite ready to commit totally, you could get another computer so you can run both systems side by side. Assuming that's not an option (for reasons of cost, desk space, or just not being geeky enough), you could do what a friend of mine does: get another hard drive. Don't even think about messing with partitions, just install on a second drive and keep the two systems completely separate.
Put both drives in your case, but only connect one at a time. When you want to switch between systems, shut the machine down, pull the ribbon cable off the one drive, and plug it into the other. This is basically an extension of the advice above -- you're completely safe from "seeing the power of the -R flag in action when you least expect it". How could you possibly mess up your Windows stuff through any mistake you make in the Linux environment? The drive is not even physically connected to the computer at the time!
I don't know how your case is designed, but my friend's boxes have reversible drive bays, so for maximum convenience he can put the drives in backward with the cable connectors facing the front. Then he can switch the cables by just pulling off the front plastic bezels and reaching in -- no need to fully open the case.
(I assume you meant "unconstitutional".)
Sorry, but there's nothing in the constitution preventing Congress to pass [un]constitutional laws.
How about all those sentences that begin with "Congress shall make no law..."? To my non-lawyer's ear at least, that sounds like a pretty explicit statement that it is illegal for Congress to make such a law. (I just said the same thing twice, didn't I?) It seems that when Congress does make such a law, they are committing a crime: it says they shall not do it ==> they did it ==> they broke the law. Right?
I just wish it included some provision for punishment of those who violate the supreme law of the land. Maybe your point would be better stated as "There is no incentive for Congress to pay any attention to the Constitution, since othing bad happens to them when they violate it."
You know, that's starting to sound like a really good analogy, even if it runs the risk of invoking a modified Godwin's Law (i.e., by making such an outrageous accusation, you officially lower the discussion to the level of flaming, so you lose).
I think it was here on slashdot that someone posted what I believe is a quote from "Alpha Centauri" (I never played the game, so I only know what I saw here). Ahem:
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free access to information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information will soon burst with freedom and vitality, while the free nation gradually constricting its grip on free discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Uhm...there's no difference between analog and digital media here, except that digital media is way easier to copy.
The underlying theme of the "it was OK for analog, but casual copying has no place in digital" argument that is common in the entertainment industry is really "with digital media, casual copying actually threatens my profits, so I'm against it".
Well, not really, but four "Offtopic" moderations on this story have beem metamoderated as "Unfair".
Ba-a-a-a-d Llama.
Can I assume that those responsible have been sacked?
Again, like I said, of course it's kind of nitpicky, but I do think it's pretty important to keep things straight when arguing a position and this one is sort of a pet peeve (like the local crypto experts who keep talking about factoring prime numbers); I didn't mean to pick on you, but I've seen it enough times that it was getting embarrassing.
Regardless of your feelings about DeCSS (I'm for it), the RIAA did a very good job of picking a target when they picked 2600 Magazine.
It's starting to scare the hell out of me, frankly, that even those of us who have insightful, reasoned, well-thought-out things to say (and sub-five-digit UIDs) can't keep the RIAA and the MPAA straight. I mean, sure they're all the same evil mega-corporate enemies of freedom and everything, but I don't recall the Recording Industry suing 2600 over the copy-protection of Motion Pictures.
What makes it so scary is wondering, if we can't even remember the names of the organizations that we're talking about, then do we really understand what's going on as well as we'd like to think we do?
Yeah, I know it's just a silly mistake, but come on.
That said, I'm totally with you on the point about how "they'll pick the ugliest targets, and try them for who they are, not what they've done, merrily building up precedents here and case law there." Very nicely worded, and an important point to which more attention needs to be drawn -- I thought the implicit acceptance of this way of doing things was the most mystifying thing about the rejection of Felten's case.
but they also have to be forwarded to the judge- who is legally required to consider the public interest when approving the decision.
What I always wonder is, in a context like this, what exactly does "consider" mean? It obviously can't mean that the decision has to be entirely determined by the feedback, since that's what the judge is for, but then how much discretion does the judge have? Is there some kind of standard for how much weight should be given to such things? Is there any protection against the judge satisfying the requirement by simply saying "Okay, I considered it."?
When you were a kid asking your parents for some new toy, how much difference did it really make whether they said "No." or "Hmm. Lemme think about it. No."?
Did I just write a post in which every unquoted sentence is a question?
Hmmm.... slashdot still can't handle "greater than" and "less than" in plain text mode.
Hmmm.... some of us still haven't figured out what Slashdot's posting modes mean, so I'll say it again: the trick is that the names of the modes are sort of "backwards" with respect to their meanings, but there's a logical reason for it, and if you think about it for a couple of minutes you'll stop being confused.
Here's the big secret: the names of the modes refer to the way the text you type in the box will be inserted into the HTML source for the page, NOT the way the text will be displayed in the browser. Think about the HTML document that is being built -- do you want your text inserted directly into the HTML source, or do you want some translation applied to it first?
Hence, "Plain Old Text" means that what I type in the box just gets pasted directly into the document with no pre-processing (*1) so any tags I type will be interpreted as such and the text will be displayed accordingly -- of course this also means that it eats your "<" sign unless you're clever and use the "<" escape sequence.
This is the exact opposite of the text being displayed "plain" with markup ignored, which seems to be what so many people expect it to mean -- that's actually what the other modes do. I don't know or care exactly what the difference between them is, but "HTML Formatted" does some translation, and "Extrans" translates even more aggressively. The rationale is that here the text is formatted into suitable HTML so it can be displayed as you typed it.
I prefer "Plain Old Text" because it lets me both type tags directly if I want to use them to adorn my text and use escapes if I want to display a tag instead of its effect, or display special characters.
*1 Except that it adds a "<BR>" wherever I hit "Enter", because it's "obvious" that I'd want that. Also, I guess it strips out non-permitted tags that would do something harmful to the resulting document, like a </TABLE> for example.
All this talk you hear of 'protecting children' is really about adult discomfort.
I remember as a teenager frequently going to the video store with my sister (four years younger) to pick out a movie for the family to watch. A lot of times, when considering some title, we'd ask each other "Do you think Mom's old enough to see this?"
It was a joke, of course. For one thing, in our case the answer was generally yes. And it wasn't really a matter of us being presumptuous enough to think we were so much more mature than our parents. It was more about [humorously expressing] a concern over the awkwardness and discomfort of watching certain things with them sitting on the same couch.
And it was uncomfortable sometimes (mostly because of strong language and, to a lesser degree, violence -- we tended to voluntarily steer clear of excessive sexual content for exactly these reasons). But a little discomfort is no reason to forego the valuable family activity of watching those movies together. Plus, my sister and I were even more liberal in recommending movies to our parents to watch separately, and vice versa.
I would suggest you check out this link.
Sorry, not from the office. I assume it contains stuff that you predict "even I" would find offensive? I doubt it, and not because I'm trying to "out-pervert" you -- I might very well find it excessive, uncomfortable, distasteful, or even disturbing, but I claim to be above being offended by anything of the sort.
Is it just me, or do you feel like you're being talked down to by the media?
The media, the government, the activists / would-be "morality cops",... It's not really clear who's most to blame. Society's overall attitudes seem to be suffering from a combination of intellectual laziness, (some) people's immaturity and "fear of cooties", politicians' willingness to exploit that through "sound-bite wars" at the exclusion of genuine dialogue, and media's readiness to stir things up in the interest of sensationalism.
By the way, in my previous comment I deliberately avoided mentioning the possibilities of other ulterior political motives since, though valid, that would have detracted from my main point. As in, "...and don't even get me started on how this is all really a malicious power grab aimed at undermining our freedoms, thinly veiled with 'protect the children' rhetoric to help push it through..."
I just have trouble comprehending the small-mindedness that could make anyone (let alone enough people to give it this sort of political critical mass) fall for any of it. Cooties, indeed.
Lately I've been getting the impression that overzealous censorship like this is an adult manifestation of fear of cooties.
That's a beautiful sentence, and it needs to get some seriously wide exposure. It manages to convey the perfect sense of contempt that is the only fitting response to the "morality" brigade's attitudes.
As I recall, through a lot of these discussions, e.g., on some of the reports from town-hall meetings regarding library-censorship proposals, a lot of us have been frustrated with trying to articulate this. Not just pointing out how unworkable censorware is from a technical standpoint (true, but reducing the argument that far is granting too much). Not even just arguing for the importance of freedom (also a vitally important argument to make, of course). But attacking the fundamental immaturity of attitudes that lies behind all of their motives.
Why would they even want to do this? Even assuming it were technically possible (which it isn't), and granting that it were important enough to justify giving up so much freedom (which I don't) -- what kind of priorities does this indicate? Why, given all the really horrible things things in the world to which kids' "fragile litle minds" are exposed, not to even get started on the things that threaten them physically, would parents choose this to focus so much attention on?
I can only think that it's because the parents aren't really grown up themselves in terms of being comfortable with sexuality, and they can't even begin to contemplate it for their kids. They live in absolute dread of the day they'll have to give the "birds and bees" talk and will lash out at anything that threatens to hasten that day.
Maybe this kind of ridicule -- attributing the censors' fears to a failure to outgrow something as childish as "fear of cooties" -- could be an effective way to drive the point across in a pulic forum.
You should also try and figure out a way to get your page posted someplace where it'll be seen by about a quarter-million geeks who've been dreaming of something like this for at least ten years.
Seriously, at $1500 a pop, limited to 320x240 greyscale, and with a 2-month waiting list (and that was presumably before today), I'd guess that you're not quite at the point where every single one of us will buy one, but even so, you probably did just secure at least a few orders. (It'd be interesting if you'd post back in a few days with the results.) The sweet spot would probably be if you could hit 640x480 and at least 8-bit color without going too far over $600.
Still, this is already pretty nice -- I'd call myself "tempted", but not quite "seriously tempted", as it is; definitely interested enough to keep an eye on your progress. The price point is probably more important than the features: I'd be more likely to buy it as it is if you got the price down than at the current price if you got the features up.
Good luck.
I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster
But what if your total workload is small enough to be handled by a single box? If, as the article states, such functions as mail, print, and file serving need to be handled by separate dedicated machines for reasons of stability, not performance, then that puts a lower bound on the number of servers you need to have ([#server machines] >= [# server applications] -- and presumably database and web serving would be boxes #4 and #5), no matter how small the total workload actually is.
That would seem to significantly raise the entry-level price point for small shops whose total workload would otherwise be nowhere near the capacity of even a single box.
You're right about the meaninglessness of d.net RC5 as a general benchmark, but let's talk about it a bit anyway, speaking of PowerPC, which I can't imagine why one wouldn't "count" as a RISC CPU (at_18 mentioned it but Jon Peterson ignored it completely). Anyway, it flies on RC5. On G3s, their Mac clients tend to score a Kkeys/sec number that is about triple the MHz of the CPU, or about 330 cycles per key. On x86 machines that I've seen, the Kkeys/sec number was about double the MHz, making 500 cycles/key. On my G3/466 Powerbook, their v2.8010-463 client for Mac OS X is currently putting away 1.54 Mkeys/sec, which I guess is comaprable to what you'd get from a 750 MHz x86. And it runs cool enough that I can leave it on and crunching around the clock. Would you want to do that with an Intel laptop, with all the power-saving options turned off to keep it running at full speed?
And that's not even mentioning the G4's vector unit: nobody seems to really agree on just how much real-world applicability AltiVec will end up having, but for what it's worth, RC5 is a pretty spectacular one. My G4/400 gets over 3.2 Mkeys/sec, or four times more than an x86, clock for clock.
Making it a crime to crack that technology [...] is to delegate lawmaking to code writers.
This is one of the most crucial points to make. The DMCA doesn't just make new (more restrictive) rules on what uses of copyrighted material are legal -- it delegates the ability to make such rules to the publishers. By criminalizing circumvention of access controls, it gives the force of law to whatever restrictions the publisher sees fit to put in place. In effect, it gives the publisher legislative power -- the ability to decide what is or isn't legal. Making corporations part of the government hardly seems appropriate.
Two other important points about the DMCA as I understand it: one is that, while it does make an exception for "fair use", that applies only to the circumvention clause, not the distribution-of-circumvention-devices one. The problem is that, since breaking an access control is beyond the abilities of all but a very few people, the effect is the same. Also, the fact that it talks about measures that "control access", instead of "prevent copying", allows the restrictions to extend into every aspect of the manner in which one enjoys the product -- what kind of stereo, CD/DVD player, or TV set you can use to play it, where you can do so, what parts you can fast-forward through, etc., which has nothing to do with copying, but does create new revenue opportunities for publishers.
Here's a new one: suppose a publisher wanted to make a book that I could only read while sitting in an armchair, not while lying in bed -- say they print it on some special high-tech paper that would turn dark when held at an upright angle. They might want to charge me extra for the ability to read in bed, or they might for some unfathomable reason simply want to insist that I can only read the book while sitting up. The DMCA would give even this the force of law! I would not be allowed to cicumvent it -- or rather, I could, but then I would not be allowed to tell anyone else how I did it, and if it was so difficult that only a handful of people could do it, then the rest of us would be bound by it. How can this be?
David Gould
This is what really annoys me. The record labels say that most of your money goes towards the rights to listen to a CD, but when you already own the rights to listen to a CD and simply need to replace the physical disc most of them force you to purchase the rights again in order to get the physical disc. I had a few CD's damaged a couple years back and asked the record labels how to get a cheap replacement disc since I already paid them for the rights to the music, and all of them except for one told me I would have to buy the CD from the store again
No, you don't understand: it's not one or the other -- whether what you paid for is ownership of the physical disc or a license to listen to it depends entirely on what right you're trying to exercise at the moment. I'll try to clarify:
If you want to justify some unconventional use of the disc by claiming that you own it and can do with it as you please, then the answer is that the piece of plastic is not important -- it's the information stored on it that matters, and to that you've only been granted a license, not ownership, and such uses are not allowed.
If on the other hand you want to use the license in some abstract sense to justify moving beyond the limitations of the physical disc, e.g., by making copies to keep in different places (home, car, office, etc.), converting to MP3, streaming the content from my.mp3.com, or demanding a new copy when the old one gets damaged, then the answer is that there's nothing special about the license -- the CD is a physical product that you buy and if you did those other things, you'd be stealing.
Hope this helps.
David Gould