This is the most disgusting thing i've read in... well hours to be honest. The Lizard Queen publically speaks about bringing the troops home, but secretly will continue the occupation and 'wars without end'. Truly an Orwellian, or Machiavellian stepford candidate.
Let's see what will the republicans bring to the table? An *ACTOR* Thompson perhaps? (Who will be the director, hmmm?)
The only candidate who will keep his promise to stop the wars without end, and who has the financial acumen to heal our national maladies is Ron Paul.
There is a very visible silver band 5mm in from the outside edge of the disk, so it's clearly been messed with.
I think this is an erroneous conclusion. IIRC,standard audio CD-players read a CD from inside to outside in a continuous spiral. They don't read the outside edge until they get to the end of the CD, so this wouldn't be a good place to put copy-prevention.
Pressing problems can cause a CD to play poorly in some devices. If your player/s is/are robust (no problems skipping with other CDs) you should be within your rights to return it.
3. Thin, round cables that incorporate power, data, and
multiplexed audio (details to be worked out).
Uh, hello? Audio is DATA. If Busmastered DMA-transfers were cleanly implemented in IDE/ATA, problem would be solved.
IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics is a severely brain-damaged spec inherited from the evil design choices IBM made back in 1981 in order to push the cost of the bus controller onto the drive mfgrs. There's no technical reason SCSI has to be expensive today.
So why in the name of Nyarlathotep do you want an extra cable for audio?
As the old adage goes, time is money and if I spend an extra 15 minutes buying a CD for $6 off, I'll have lost a lot more in billable time than I could possibly save on the CD. [snip] I don't mean to sound like a snob...
User Info for fmaxwell: fmaxwell has posted 561 comments.
Hahaha! That's rich.
Do I have to explain it? Ok, if fmaxwells' time is so valuable, what's he doing pissing it-away on Slashdot?
Pressed for time? try www.gemm.com
Aaand, you think you know what really happened 9/11? Take, for example, just one 'fact' that 'everybody knows': Everyone is quoting the figure of 6,000 dead.
Guess what? It's a god-damned lie. As of Oct 15, the NYPD had 2,500 confirmed dead. The Red Cross estimated slightly under 2,600 total.
The fact that this is relatively unknown should raise some questions about fairness and accuracy in western reporting.
The Truth? You can't handle the truth!
emperors-clothes.com
What does that even mean? It is not the job of the patent office to evaluate quality.
Perhaps this was a poor choice of words. I guess it depends on your interpretation of 'quality'.
There are 'qualities' which the patent office does (or should) use to evaluate the patentability of an application. Patents like the wheel, or Bezos' one-click, or XORing a bit should have failed on the standard of triviality and obviousness - but they didn't.
What is the societal justification of the entire patent process? To create an environment in which inventors can recoup their RnD costs.
Clever ideas that can be implemented by an individual a few hours do not represent a 'significant RnD effort' and thus IMO do not meet the criteria of patentability.
Look, a lot of good, clever ideas are shared by a lot of people. If someone uses the patent process to lock-out others from independently discovering and applying a clever algorithm, Open-Source and society suffers - massively.
Many patents, esp. software patents, fail to meet this 'high investement' critera. They're a completely different category from, say, patents on pharmaceutical drugs which require hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D.
The patent proces should differentiate between a simple, clever idea that anyone could implement, and an invention that is the result of significant RnD work. I'd argue that we adopt one man-month of RnD as the minimum effort for patentability of *anything*.
Just last week, some folks on the xmame mailing list were discussing modelines for dedicated mame/linux boxes with tv-out.
try searching www.deja.com and www.alltheweb.com
If you're using a TNT or Geforce, look at the pdf file available at Nvidia's Linux driver webpage. It contains a section belonging to the TV output of these
cards.
Indeed, and you forgot to mention the DVD region coding bullshit, and (at least in Germany) the 16% sales-tax on just about _everything_.
I think US-Americans would start shooting politicians if they tried raising VAT to 16%, or tax on gasoline to 300% the way they do here.
The answer (for me) is to bike instead of driving and buy DVDs, software and hardware from friends in the US. And of course, apply that region-code hack and buy a 110V power supply.
Well, if the point of writing games is to make money, Deer Hunter was a stroke of genius.
A friend of mine 'invented' deer hunter for Valusoft/GT Interactive.
IIRC, the game took 2 months to write and cost $62,000. I don't recall how much money GTI made off it, but lets just say the suits were creaming. AFAIK the programmers and my friend never saw any of that money (in the form of bonuses or comissions).
Frauenhofer institute tests (sorry, no link) indicate that 9X% of people can't tell the difference between 128kb mp3 and CD.
I have a friend who actually *enjoys* listening to 24kbps streaming.ra or.mp3. Last time he showed me his streaming site he gave me this happy-dog-wanting-approval look saying 'doesn't this sound GREAT!'. My response: [pained expression] - 'dude, it's OK for a 24kbps stream, but that shit hurts my ears - you've got hearing damage from too may years performing on-stage'.
I can nearly always tell the difference between a 128kb mp3 and the CD in an A/B comparision. I can often tell the diff between *any* file compressed with 'perceptual encoding' techniques.
Worse still, some 5% of music I encode generates really nasty overtones (afx twin ambient works I comes to mind) when encoded in mp3. Gotta go 256vbr or better.
Detecting distortion from perceptual encoding is a learned skill.
Also HPT370 support, and BT848 support are unselectable in make xconfig.
Anyone else seeing these problems?
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o: In function `es1371_probe':
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o(.text+0x67e9): undefined reference to `gameport_register_port'
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o: In function `es1371_remove':
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o(.text+0x6906): undefined reference to `gameport_unregister_port'
I'm using 2.4.10 with Andrea Arcangeli's preempt patch, and I regularly suffer severe swap problems just by listening to mp3s and browsing the web. Please read on before you write me off as a luser or a FUDdite.
I'm typically running apache, cups, KDE, a few konsole windows, kppp, konqueror, and xmms (random play of a 6000 song mp3 archive niced at -19),.
To reduce my per-minute ISP fees, I open-up a konqueror window for each topic I'm interested-in (incl. several slashdot discussions) and log-out as soon as the pages finish loading. Then I peruse the news and discussions offline. This technique can easily cut my monthly ISP bill by 50%.
My problem with this technique is that when I open the 12-16th konqueror window, the machine slows to a c r a w l, sometimes even causing my high-priority pre-empting xmms mp3 playback to skip. So I begin very slowly closing konqueror windows... sometimes the swapthrash stops after closing a big (slashdot) window, other times I need to killall konqueror.
My setup is pretty typical: an ABIT BE6 mobo with a Geforce 2 MX (Xfree 4.1.0 with nvidia 1541 binary drivers), Celeron 750 256mb RAM, 512MB swap, running a slightly tweaked Mandrake 8.0 (traktopel) distro.. Oh, and a 1600x1200 24bpp desktop.
I'd be very interested to hear whether anyone else sees this behavior when opening 12-16 konqueror windows.
I'm not blaming the Kernel VM just yet: memory problems can be caused by bad userland software.
Could it be that when Konqueror renders a web-page, it renders the whole thing to a big-ol bitmap (including stuff that's off-screen)? If this is true, than the bitmap representation of a typical slashdot discussion containing 30+ screen-pages of text would require a bitmap of 800 x (1200 x 30) pixels = 28,800,000 pixels.. @ 24bpp -> 86,400,000 bytes! Whoah! Is konqueror that much of a pig?
I rather doubt this, but I still suspect Konqueror is maintaining more 'state information' than it needs-to in the event that a window gets hidden behind another window. Naively, all it really needs to store is the URL and any HTML/Javascript contained therein -- a few hundred kB per page... right?
Oh, and X surely needs to keep a buffer of the window's bitmap (800x1200@24bpp=3MB), but even with 20 open windows, that shouldn't strain a system with 256 MB RAM + 512 MB swap? Rrrright?
Can someone share similar experiences? Or share tips for dealing with this? (other than "open fewer windows" or "buy more RAM")
Osama Bin Laden got BILLIONS to spend, for example
The correct grammar is "Osama Bin Laden gots BILLIONS to spend"...
:-)
But seriously, your post is chock full of non-sequiturs and incorrect statements of fact. Last news report I saw (Euronews) stated OSB's funds were somewhere around the 100 million mark, and probably less after his construction firm experienced heavy losses in Ethiopia.
I apologize for this 'mee-too post', but parent comment is 100% on-the-money.
Our generation will witness commonplace use of modified plasmids, phages and virii to perform specific therapeutic (and destructive?) tasks in the human body.
I'd bet you my computer that we'll all be long dead before 100% synthetic, non-biological 'nanotech' virii see the light of day.
Life has gotten alot safer and much less dangerous in Europe, Pacific Rim, China, and the Americas than it was...oh just 11 years ago.
It almost seems that with each "super-weapon" the nations that deploy them become more and more restrained.
Not quite; western goverments and media are just getting much better at brainwashing their citizenry and killing by proxy.
For a timely counterexample, consider the millions of starving Afghanis fleeing the recent US-sponsored terror campaign.
Or consider the hundreds of thousands of dead in Ruanda, or the tens of thousands of dead in Yugoslavia/Albania and Checchnia.
Read Choamsky, if you have the stomach for it.
And this premise of nanotech "getting into the wrong hands" is laughable. It is pioneered by the US govt, which has in the past secretly tested chemical, biological and nuclear warfare agents upon unwitting US citizens, and has no qualms about killing millions of innocent civilians in pursuit of "US Interests".
And no, I will not give you links. Use a search engine. Or keep your head stuck in the sand. The view is much more comforting from there.
Haven't you ever looked through a microscope at a paramecium? You can see right through the little buggers. Now why would you want to x-ray it? Well, fact is 'soft x-rays' have been used in microscopy for a while now..
A ?true? story that gives me chills. - Background: A group of net punks decides to portscan the entire internet... and they disturb *something*...
Full story at: www.viacorp.com/auditing.html
they're heeeere...
Friday, our Japanese participants discover that a computer on their
company network has been cracked into, one very secure Linux box running
only SSH and Apache 1.3.4. Now this would definitely send a chill
up your spine if you knew just how fanatic our friends are when it comes
to network security. Furthermore, they only detected the intrusion three
days after the fact, which is unbelievable when you consider the insane
monitoring levels they've been keeping since they agreed to participate
in the scan. They would have noticed any funny stuff, and in fact, they did,
lots of it, but none of which came close enough to a security breach to raise
any alarms.
Readers should also note how although a key binary in the cracked
machine had been modified, tripwire and an assortment of other booby
traps failed to detect this had happened. Even a close-up manual inspection
(comparing file contents with a trusted backup, playing with it's name)
could not detect any odd behavior. This trick, and others equally spooky
were achieved by clever manipulation of the OS's kernel code
(dynamicly, through a module).
Other characteristics of the attack which make it so eerily sophisticated:
The attacker (convincingly) masquerades as a local employee.
The attacker knows the employee's username and password and is even connecting
through the employee's Japanese ISP on the employee's account!
(the phone company identified this was an untraceable overseas caller)
This information could not have been sniffed, since network
services are only provided over encrypted SSH sessions.
Further investigation shows that this employee's personal NT box,
connected over a dynamic dailup connection, had been cracked into
4 days earlier.
His ssh client (TTSSH extension to TeraTerm) had been trojaned to
transmit XOR garbled account information (hostname/username/password)
over pseudo-DNS udp packets to a refurnished i486 Redhat v4.2 box used
as a single-purpose cheap Samba fileserver in a small Australian
ISP.
The little box was every cracker's dream, a discrete, utopian crack
haven, installed by a former Linux-savvy administrator, the last of
it's kind in a homogeneous Unix-illiterate Microsoft environment. The
ISP practicly ignored the box, which was running (up 270 days
straight) so reliably none of them had even bothered to log in since
mid 1997! So as long as the crackers kept Samba running, they would
the box completely to themselves.
How the NT box was cracked into in the first place is still a mystery. The
logs weren't helpful (surprise! surprise!) and the only way we were
even able to confirm this had happened was by putting a sniff on the NT's
traffic (following a hunch) and catching those sneaky packets redhanded,
transmitting our SSH identification down under.
We never liked NT before, being generally suspicious of propriety
blackbox OS, from a company with a long history of poor quality
bloatware. But realizing just how helpless we were against an attacker
that obviously knew the ins and outs of this can-of-worms OS, the
company recognized that NT was a serious security hazard and changed
it's security policies to keep it as far away from it's systems as
possible, and this included restricting employees from using it from
at home to log into the company network (even with SSH).
The attacker is using a custom built software penetration agent.
This is only an hypothesis, but is strongly supported by the fact that
the entire attack only lasted an incredible 8 seconds! During which
the attacker manages to log on (over an employee's SSH account, no
less), gain root privileges, backdoor the system, remove any
(standard) traces of it's activity and log off.
And they probably would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for
those meddling kids!
Who thoughtfully installed a crude old tty surveillance-camera hack
that trapped IO calls to and from isatty(3) file descriptors, in
realtime, saving them on file along with a timestamp for neato
it's-almost-as-if-you-were-there playback qualities.
And Wow! If there ever was a crack to appreciate for it's elegance,
simplicity, and efficiency, this was it.
First off this thing is smoking fast! Which puts the likelihood of any
manual intervention at square zero. It's also mean and lean. Forget
fumbling with an FTP client, leave that to the slow soft pink-bellied
human cracker-weenies, real agents pump files directly through the
shell (uuencode(1)'d at one end, uudecode(1)'d at the
other). Extending privileges with an army of amateurish recipe-book
Bugtraq exploits? I think not! Introducing the super-exploit, an
all-in-one security penetration wonder which quickly identifies and
exploits any local security vulnerabilities for that wholesome,
crispy, UID zero flavor (we were vulnerable to a recent KDE
buffer overflow). After promptly confirming it's shiny new
root privileges, the agent transfers it's last archive (a cross
between a self-installing feature-rich backdoor, and a
clean-up-the-mess, we-were-never-here log doctor), executes it and
logs off.
After watching the attack on playback (at 1/8 of it's original speed)
several times over, standard security-compromise ritual kicked
in. We took the affected machine offline, remounted the disks
read-only, fired up our trusty filesystem debugger, and slaved away to
salvage whatever we could. Luckily, we found the attacker's
transfered archives still intact, along with large fragments of the
undoctored logs, allowing us to fill any still-missing details on the
blitz attack. At the end of the day, when we finished playing with the
cracked machine on loopback, we changed the compromised account's
password, restored binary integrity, rebooted the system and put it
back on the network, this time running a network dump of all
it's incoming-outgoing traffic, just to be on the safe side.
I'm finding that freedoms are always offset by duties. I'm finding that 'freedom to' is different from 'freedom from'. And I'm convinced that no country, state or locality is free from abuses of state power.
So while your question has merit, I think you ought to consider exactly what freedoms are important to you, as well as what other lifestyle factors weigh in your decision. Ignore language and culture at your peril.
I was rather shocked to find that my new country does not grant me the freedom to tell someone what I think of him/her, if that speech can be construed as insulting. Yes, insulting a person is illegal where I live.
Or take Sweden, for e.g. where you do not have the freedom to work hard and get comfortably wealthy. A Dentist FOAF claims he gets taxed to the extent that he has little more disposable income than a school janitor.
So ymmv. As long as they don't bust down your door and steal your divx, pr0n and mp3 collection, do like Bob Marley sez:
Lord, how I loathe these dopey, glassy-eyed, brainwashed nationalistic USian jingo robots.
Please lift me up and cleanse me, dear lord, of the urge to smear poop in their faces.
The world will move on, and the American people will forget before this war will be done.
What kind of bullshit is this? American people will forget what exactlyForget WTC? Aah right. Before you rite sumthin reel smart, be shure to theenk carfulley if yer sentence makes eny sense. If it doesn't, you've just kaught yourself intellectually wanking. [bitch-slap] Shame on you.
But 5000 Americans will still be dead.
Oh come off it, duuuude. The Red Cross lists 2,600 dead, and all the employees lost by firms in the building total to about 2,500. The number of tourists and service workers is estimated at maximally 300.
Now isn't it just FUNNY how most of America is still referring to 5-6,000 dead?
There is nothing to stop it from happening again. Be glad you live in a country that has the strength and capability to try and change that.
For a human to be able to write a sentence like this requires complete ignorance and/or denial of US foreign policy of the past 50+ years.
I can understand that. In this case, ignorance is bliss. The truth hurts - and I'm guessing it's probably more than your shriveled spirit can handle.
In the last twenty years, the USA has been the greatest promoter of global wholesale terror in the entire world. The USA has done more to cause ethnic violence, terror, torture and economic impoverishment than any other nation on the planet. You are, indeed, 'number one', you fat fucking chumps.
The way to stop the small-scale (retail) terrorism we've seen from islamic fundamentalists is to stop the large-scale (wholesale) terrorism practiced by the USA and its surrogates.
But I expect this message will go right over your head - possibly because it's wedged so deep in your remote-controlled Commander In Chiefs' ass that you can't hear anything above his flatulence. If you are wondering why GWB's farts smell like rotting Afghani children, I can give you a four word hint: Perfectly Preventable Plagues and Pestilence.
The USA is quietly executing the greatest act of genocide of the new millenium. Since the advent of the bombing the number of Afghanis who have fled in terror and/or are starving and cut-off from food relief by US bombing has increased to 7 to 8 MILLION. Tens of thousands of innocent people are starving to death, and the USA is pursuing an illegal unilateral military invasion designed to remind the world who's #1 in the new milennium. Refugee camps have been mysteriously plagued by diseases not previously known to the country.
When it comes to computer memory, Kilo- Mega- and Giga- have different meanings than they do in math or physics.
The computer industry had a long tradition of using these prefixes to indicate the storage of the closest power of 2. i.e.
1KB = 1,024 B
1MB = 1,024 * 1,024 B
1GB = 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024
etc...
I used to work as the "Vendor Notes Specialist" at a major computer distributor. Sometime around 1994 a hard drive manufacturer (Connor AFAIK) adopted the sleazy technique of using the non-computer definition of Mega- to describe their drive capacity. This gave them a slight capacity edge in a highly price-sensitive market.
I can tell you, I was pissed at the deception, as were Seagate and other storage manufacturers - but the rest were pressured by their marketing departments to adopt the same measures. Soon, all HDDs and streamers used this convention.
But it got worse. About a year after that, Colorado (I believe) began listing the capacity of their Qic-80 streamers as DOUBLE the actual capacity "because our software compresses the data". This was complete BUNK because their compression CANNOT compress already compressed data (e.g. JPGs or ZIP files).
Enough people screamed about this deception (Marketing=Ministry of Lies) so that shortly thereafter, mfgrs began listing both estimated compressed capacity, as well as native (uncompressed capacities).
Sad to see the above at score=0. It is basically spot-on.
Linux as a whole would benefit if more distros split into server and workstation versions (or better yet, into server/workstation and appliance versions).
Many, or most people are too dumb and/or lazy to read 5 pages of a manual, let alone any significant portion of the 500,000 pages of (often out-of-date) docs and howtos that accompany a typical linux distro.
A good percentage are even too dumb/lazy to deal with a username/password prompt, or simply type on a keyboard.
These people don't want the flexibility and power of a computer. They want an appliance -- an appliance that turns-on right away, lets them surf the web, watch TV/DVDs, play some games and maybe even type a letter or read email.
If Lindows provides an "appliance-like" user experience, they'll have a fair shot at making some sales to the luser crowd. But to grab any real slice of that market will require OEM integration into cheaper, fast-booting (or state-saving) devices. But this is exactly where Microsoft's exclusivity agreements with OEMs poses a nearly insurmountable barrier to broad access to the retail market.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most technology shows a trend from requiring detailed knowledge (early cars for e.g.) to being as idiot-proof as possible. If a Linux distro such as Lindows aims to achieve mass-market penetration as an "appliance", it needs to:
Define a market segment, understand the users and dump any unneeded baggage
Jump ahead of Microsoft on the ease-of-use timeline.
Support a large subset of Win32 programs via an improved Wine
Co-develop with hardware vendors "true appliances" with a limited set of hardware options and enhanced usability features (fast boots, state-saves, automagic driver and flash upgrades)
The standard MS-Office document format won't change until M$ makes it the default file format in their "Save File" dialog box.
Look, users are D-U-M-B. Mind-numbingly so. People email me documents written in Office 2000 and when I tell them "Sorry, could you please resend that in a non-proprietary format like RTF?" they look at me as if I just asked, "Saleem, archkyb sloyota mar beekshash fulububbl zarg DYP?"
I mean, they don't even understand that a document can be stored in multiple file formats. I actually have to stand next to them, hold their hand and move the mouse over the drop menu for file formats.
So far the only killing sprees I've engaged-in are of my own brain cells under alcohol-induced apoxia. And I'm not making any promisies concerning the future.
In germany, people are getting three-year sentences for mailing prank powders. They shut-down the building, call-in the detectives and the spacemen. I can see some justification because the disruption can be very expensive.
I don't recall the exact law that is being violated, but Germany is a country in which threatening or even insulting someone is a punishable offense. I kid you not. Giving someone (esp a govt. official) the finger can be very expensive.
...and the Germans mock the americans for their "blue laws"...
Slashdot Mirror
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton secretly wants to extend the troop presence (and hence conflict) in Iraq through 'her second term', NPR recently revealed HERE ahref=http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/The_New_Pr ince_Hillary_Clinton_s_Duty_to_Mislead_One_More_De cade_in_Iraqrel=url2html-6277http://digg.com/2008_ us_elections/The_New_Prince_Hillary_Clinton_s_Duty _to_Mislead_One_More_Decade_in_Iraq>
... well hours to be honest. The Lizard Queen publically speaks about bringing the troops home, but secretly will continue the occupation and 'wars without end'. Truly an Orwellian, or Machiavellian stepford candidate.
This is the most disgusting thing i've read in
Let's see what will the republicans bring to the table? An *ACTOR* Thompson perhaps? (Who will be the director, hmmm?)
The only candidate who will keep his promise to stop the wars without end, and who has the financial acumen to heal our national maladies is Ron Paul.
No comparison. No question.
I think this is an erroneous conclusion. IIRC,standard audio CD-players read a CD from inside to outside in a continuous spiral. They don't read the outside edge until they get to the end of the CD, so this wouldn't be a good place to put copy-prevention.
Pressing problems can cause a CD to play poorly in some devices. If your player/s is/are robust (no problems skipping with other CDs) you should be within your rights to return it.
Uh, hello? Audio is DATA. If Busmastered DMA-transfers were cleanly implemented in IDE/ATA, problem would be solved.
IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics is a severely brain-damaged spec inherited from the evil design choices IBM made back in 1981 in order to push the cost of the bus controller onto the drive mfgrs. There's no technical reason SCSI has to be expensive today.
So why in the name of Nyarlathotep do you want an extra cable for audio?
User Info for fmaxwell: fmaxwell has posted 561 comments.
Hahaha! That's rich. Do I have to explain it? Ok, if fmaxwells' time is so valuable, what's he doing pissing it-away on Slashdot? Pressed for time? try www.gemm.com
"...that 9/11 really happened"
Aaand, you think you know what really happened 9/11? Take, for example, just one 'fact' that 'everybody knows': Everyone is quoting the figure of 6,000 dead.
Guess what? It's a god-damned lie. As of Oct 15, the NYPD had 2,500 confirmed dead. The Red Cross estimated slightly under 2,600 total.
The fact that this is relatively unknown should raise some questions about fairness and accuracy in western reporting.
The Truth? You can't handle the truth!
emperors-clothes.com
What does that even mean? It is not the job of the patent office to evaluate quality.
Perhaps this was a poor choice of words. I guess it depends on your interpretation of 'quality'.
There are 'qualities' which the patent office does (or should) use to evaluate the patentability of an application. Patents like the wheel, or Bezos' one-click, or XORing a bit should have failed on the standard of triviality and obviousness - but they didn't.
What is the societal justification of the entire patent process? To create an environment in which inventors can recoup their RnD costs.
Clever ideas that can be implemented by an individual a few hours do not represent a 'significant RnD effort' and thus IMO do not meet the criteria of patentability.
Look, a lot of good, clever ideas are shared by a lot of people. If someone uses the patent process to lock-out others from independently discovering and applying a clever algorithm, Open-Source and society suffers - massively.
Many patents, esp. software patents, fail to meet this 'high investement' critera. They're a completely different category from, say, patents on pharmaceutical drugs which require hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D.
The patent proces should differentiate between a simple, clever idea that anyone could implement, and an invention that is the result of significant RnD work. I'd argue that we adopt one man-month of RnD as the minimum effort for patentability of *anything*.
arnim
This has been done.
Just last week, some folks on the xmame mailing list were discussing modelines for dedicated mame/linux boxes with tv-out.
try searching www.deja.com and www.alltheweb.com
If you're using a TNT or Geforce, look at the pdf file available at Nvidia's Linux driver webpage. It contains a section belonging to the TV output of these
cards.
Indeed, and you forgot to mention the DVD region coding bullshit, and (at least in Germany) the 16% sales-tax on just about _everything_.
I think US-Americans would start shooting politicians if they tried raising VAT to 16%, or tax on gasoline to 300% the way they do here.
The answer (for me) is to bike instead of driving and buy DVDs, software and hardware from friends in the US. And of course, apply that region-code hack and buy a 110V power supply.
There are ways around everything...
Which reminds me, any electronica freaks here?
No seriously, I had this idea in 1989, back in a really boring physics lab. I think I still have the sketches somewhere.
My point? It doesn't take much to have a 'good idea' it takes a genius to make it work and make money off it.
Oh wait, T.A.Edison already said it better, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
Or you could educate yourself about some good electronica
Well, if the point of writing games is to make money, Deer Hunter was a stroke of genius.
A friend of mine 'invented' deer hunter for Valusoft/GT Interactive.
IIRC, the game took 2 months to write and cost $62,000. I don't recall how much money GTI made off it, but lets just say the suits were creaming. AFAIK the programmers and my friend never saw any of that money (in the form of bonuses or comissions).
Oh well... Interested in good electronica?
Many people have 'tin ears'.
.ra or .mp3. Last time he showed me his streaming site he gave me this happy-dog-wanting-approval look saying 'doesn't this sound GREAT!'. My response: [pained expression] - 'dude, it's OK for a 24kbps stream, but that shit hurts my ears - you've got hearing damage from too may years performing on-stage'.
Frauenhofer institute tests (sorry, no link) indicate that 9X% of people can't tell the difference between 128kb mp3 and CD.
I have a friend who actually *enjoys* listening to 24kbps streaming
I can nearly always tell the difference between a 128kb mp3 and the CD in an A/B comparision. I can often tell the diff between *any* file compressed with 'perceptual encoding' techniques.
Worse still, some 5% of music I encode generates really nasty overtones (afx twin ambient works I comes to mind) when encoded in mp3. Gotta go 256vbr or better.
Detecting distortion from perceptual encoding is a learned skill.
Listen, Learn.
make bzImage craps-out with the following error:
Also HPT370 support, and BT848 support are unselectable in make xconfig.
Anyone else seeing these problems?
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o: In function `es1371_probe':
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o(.text+0x67e9): undefined reference to `gameport_register_port'
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o: In function `es1371_remove':
drivers/sound/sounddrivers.o(.text+0x6906): undefined reference to `gameport_unregister_port'
That's a serious error in an otherwise excellent post. While 'warp-drives' are a fantasy, transgenic animals (and chimeras) are a reality today.
Inserting foreign DNA into cells became a standard technique of molecular biology shortly after Delbrueck and Luria's pioneering phage work in 1969.
See www.amphilsoc.org/library/browser/l/luria.htm
I'm typically running apache, cups, KDE, a few konsole windows, kppp, konqueror, and xmms (random play of a 6000 song mp3 archive niced at -19),.
To reduce my per-minute ISP fees, I open-up a konqueror window for each topic I'm interested-in (incl. several slashdot discussions) and log-out as soon as the pages finish loading. Then I peruse the news and discussions offline. This technique can easily cut my monthly ISP bill by 50%.
My problem with this technique is that when I open the 12-16th konqueror window, the machine slows to a c r a w l, sometimes even causing my high-priority pre-empting xmms mp3 playback to skip. So I begin very slowly closing konqueror windows... sometimes the swapthrash stops after closing a big (slashdot) window, other times I need to killall konqueror.
My setup is pretty typical: an ABIT BE6 mobo with a Geforce 2 MX (Xfree 4.1.0 with nvidia 1541 binary drivers), Celeron 750 256mb RAM, 512MB swap, running a slightly tweaked Mandrake 8.0 (traktopel) distro.. Oh, and a 1600x1200 24bpp desktop.
I'd be very interested to hear whether anyone else sees this behavior when opening 12-16 konqueror windows.
I'm not blaming the Kernel VM just yet: memory problems can be caused by bad userland software.
Could it be that when Konqueror renders a web-page, it renders the whole thing to a big-ol bitmap (including stuff that's off-screen)? If this is true, than the bitmap representation of a typical slashdot discussion containing 30+ screen-pages of text would require a bitmap of 800 x (1200 x 30) pixels = 28,800,000 pixels.. @ 24bpp -> 86,400,000 bytes! Whoah! Is konqueror that much of a pig?
I rather doubt this, but I still suspect Konqueror is maintaining more 'state information' than it needs-to in the event that a window gets hidden behind another window. Naively, all it really needs to store is the URL and any HTML/Javascript contained therein -- a few hundred kB per page... right?
Oh, and X surely needs to keep a buffer of the window's bitmap (800x1200@24bpp=3MB), but even with 20 open windows, that shouldn't strain a system with 256 MB RAM + 512 MB swap? Rrrright?
Can someone share similar experiences? Or share tips for dealing with this? (other than "open fewer windows" or "buy more RAM")
TIA
The correct grammar is "Osama Bin Laden gots BILLIONS to spend"...
:-)
But seriously, your post is chock full of non-sequiturs and incorrect statements of fact. Last news report I saw (Euronews) stated OSB's funds were somewhere around the 100 million mark, and probably less after his construction firm experienced heavy losses in Ethiopia.
I apologize for this 'mee-too post', but parent comment is 100% on-the-money.
Our generation will witness commonplace use of modified plasmids, phages and virii to perform specific therapeutic (and destructive?) tasks in the human body.
I'd bet you my computer that we'll all be long dead before 100% synthetic, non-biological 'nanotech' virii see the light of day.
Not quite; western goverments and media are just getting much better at brainwashing their citizenry and killing by proxy.
For a timely counterexample, consider the millions of starving Afghanis fleeing the recent US-sponsored terror campaign.
Or consider the hundreds of thousands of dead in Ruanda, or the tens of thousands of dead in Yugoslavia/Albania and Checchnia.
Read Choamsky, if you have the stomach for it.
And this premise of nanotech "getting into the wrong hands" is laughable. It is pioneered by the US govt, which has in the past secretly tested chemical, biological and nuclear warfare agents upon unwitting US citizens, and has no qualms about killing millions of innocent civilians in pursuit of "US Interests".
And no, I will not give you links. Use a search engine. Or keep your head stuck in the sand. The view is much more comforting from there.
can you imagine a paramecium 'xray'?
e -c ells.html
Haven't you ever looked through a microscope at a paramecium? You can see right through the little buggers. Now why would you want to x-ray it? Well, fact is 'soft x-rays' have been used in microscopy for a while now..
some links for the lazy:
www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/xray-insid
www-cxro.lbl.gov/microscopy/
cindy.lbl.gov/microscopy/contrast.html
Full story at: www.viacorp.com/auditing.html
they're heeeere...
Friday, our Japanese participants discover that a computer on their company network has been cracked into, one very secure Linux box running only SSH and Apache 1.3.4. Now this would definitely send a chill up your spine if you knew just how fanatic our friends are when it comes to network security. Furthermore, they only detected the intrusion three days after the fact, which is unbelievable when you consider the insane monitoring levels they've been keeping since they agreed to participate in the scan. They would have noticed any funny stuff, and in fact, they did, lots of it, but none of which came close enough to a security breach to raise any alarms.
Readers should also note how although a key binary in the cracked machine had been modified, tripwire and an assortment of other booby traps failed to detect this had happened. Even a close-up manual inspection (comparing file contents with a trusted backup, playing with it's name) could not detect any odd behavior. This trick, and others equally spooky were achieved by clever manipulation of the OS's kernel code (dynamicly, through a module).
Other characteristics of the attack which make it so eerily sophisticated:
The attacker knows the employee's username and password and is even connecting through the employee's Japanese ISP on the employee's account! (the phone company identified this was an untraceable overseas caller)
This information could not have been sniffed, since network services are only provided over encrypted SSH sessions.
Further investigation shows that this employee's personal NT box, connected over a dynamic dailup connection, had been cracked into 4 days earlier.
His ssh client (TTSSH extension to TeraTerm) had been trojaned to transmit XOR garbled account information (hostname/username/password) over pseudo-DNS udp packets to a refurnished i486 Redhat v4.2 box used as a single-purpose cheap Samba fileserver in a small Australian ISP.
The little box was every cracker's dream, a discrete, utopian crack haven, installed by a former Linux-savvy administrator, the last of it's kind in a homogeneous Unix-illiterate Microsoft environment. The ISP practicly ignored the box, which was running (up 270 days straight) so reliably none of them had even bothered to log in since mid 1997! So as long as the crackers kept Samba running, they would the box completely to themselves.
How the NT box was cracked into in the first place is still a mystery. The logs weren't helpful (surprise! surprise!) and the only way we were even able to confirm this had happened was by putting a sniff on the NT's traffic (following a hunch) and catching those sneaky packets redhanded, transmitting our SSH identification down under.
We never liked NT before, being generally suspicious of propriety blackbox OS, from a company with a long history of poor quality bloatware. But realizing just how helpless we were against an attacker that obviously knew the ins and outs of this can-of-worms OS, the company recognized that NT was a serious security hazard and changed it's security policies to keep it as far away from it's systems as possible, and this included restricting employees from using it from at home to log into the company network (even with SSH).
This is only an hypothesis, but is strongly supported by the fact that the entire attack only lasted an incredible 8 seconds! During which the attacker manages to log on (over an employee's SSH account, no less), gain root privileges, backdoor the system, remove any (standard) traces of it's activity and log off.
And they probably would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids!
Who thoughtfully installed a crude old tty surveillance-camera hack that trapped IO calls to and from isatty(3) file descriptors, in realtime, saving them on file along with a timestamp for neato it's-almost-as-if-you-were-there playback qualities.
And Wow! If there ever was a crack to appreciate for it's elegance, simplicity, and efficiency, this was it.
First off this thing is smoking fast! Which puts the likelihood of any manual intervention at square zero. It's also mean and lean. Forget fumbling with an FTP client, leave that to the slow soft pink-bellied human cracker-weenies, real agents pump files directly through the shell (uuencode(1)'d at one end, uudecode(1)'d at the other). Extending privileges with an army of amateurish recipe-book Bugtraq exploits? I think not! Introducing the super-exploit, an all-in-one security penetration wonder which quickly identifies and exploits any local security vulnerabilities for that wholesome, crispy, UID zero flavor (we were vulnerable to a recent KDE buffer overflow). After promptly confirming it's shiny new root privileges, the agent transfers it's last archive (a cross between a self-installing feature-rich backdoor, and a clean-up-the-mess, we-were-never-here log doctor), executes it and logs off.
After watching the attack on playback (at 1/8 of it's original speed) several times over, standard security-compromise ritual kicked in. We took the affected machine offline, remounted the disks read-only, fired up our trusty filesystem debugger, and slaved away to salvage whatever we could. Luckily, we found the attacker's transfered archives still intact, along with large fragments of the undoctored logs, allowing us to fill any still-missing details on the blitz attack. At the end of the day, when we finished playing with the cracked machine on loopback, we changed the compromised account's password, restored binary integrity, rebooted the system and put it back on the network, this time running a network dump of all it's incoming-outgoing traffic, just to be on the safe side.
I hear you. I 'fled' the USA in November, 1999.
I'm finding that freedoms are always offset by duties. I'm finding that 'freedom to' is different from 'freedom from'. And I'm convinced that no country, state or locality is free from abuses of state power.
So while your question has merit, I think you ought to consider exactly what freedoms are important to you, as well as what other lifestyle factors weigh in your decision. Ignore language and culture at your peril.
I was rather shocked to find that my new country does not grant me the freedom to tell someone what I think of him/her, if that speech can be construed as insulting. Yes, insulting a person is illegal where I live.
Or take Sweden, for e.g. where you do not have the freedom to work hard and get comfortably wealthy. A Dentist FOAF claims he gets taxed to the extent that he has little more disposable income than a school janitor.
So ymmv. As long as they don't bust down your door and steal your divx, pr0n and mp3 collection, do like Bob Marley sez:
"Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights."
Lord, how I loathe these dopey, glassy-eyed, brainwashed nationalistic USian jingo robots.
Please lift me up and cleanse me, dear lord, of the urge to smear poop in their faces.
The world will move on, and the American people will forget before this war will be done.
What kind of bullshit is this? American people will forget what exactlyForget WTC? Aah right. Before you rite sumthin reel smart, be shure to theenk carfulley if yer sentence makes eny sense. If it doesn't, you've just kaught yourself intellectually wanking. [bitch-slap] Shame on you.
But 5000 Americans will still be dead. Oh come off it, duuuude. The Red Cross lists 2,600 dead, and all the employees lost by firms in the building total to about 2,500. The number of tourists and service workers is estimated at maximally 300.
Now isn't it just FUNNY how most of America is still referring to 5-6,000 dead?
There is nothing to stop it from happening again. Be glad you live in a country that has the strength and capability to try and change that.
For a human to be able to write a sentence like this requires complete ignorance and/or denial of US foreign policy of the past 50+ years. I can understand that. In this case, ignorance is bliss. The truth hurts - and I'm guessing it's probably more than your shriveled spirit can handle. In the last twenty years, the USA has been the greatest promoter of global wholesale terror in the entire world. The USA has done more to cause ethnic violence, terror, torture and economic impoverishment than any other nation on the planet. You are, indeed, 'number one', you fat fucking chumps. The way to stop the small-scale (retail) terrorism we've seen from islamic fundamentalists is to stop the large-scale (wholesale) terrorism practiced by the USA and its surrogates.
But I expect this message will go right over your head - possibly because it's wedged so deep in your remote-controlled Commander In Chiefs' ass that you can't hear anything above his flatulence. If you are wondering why GWB's farts smell like rotting Afghani children, I can give you a four word hint: Perfectly Preventable Plagues and Pestilence. The USA is quietly executing the greatest act of genocide of the new millenium. Since the advent of the bombing the number of Afghanis who have fled in terror and/or are starving and cut-off from food relief by US bombing has increased to 7 to 8 MILLION. Tens of thousands of innocent people are starving to death, and the USA is pursuing an illegal unilateral military invasion designed to remind the world who's #1 in the new milennium. Refugee camps have been mysteriously plagued by diseases not previously known to the country.
Loligo, you seem to be confused. Pay attention:
When it comes to computer memory, Kilo- Mega- and Giga- have different meanings than they do in math or physics.
The computer industry had a long tradition of using these prefixes to indicate the storage of the closest power of 2. i.e.
1KB = 1,024 B
1MB = 1,024 * 1,024 B
1GB = 1,024 * 1,024 * 1,024
etc...
I used to work as the "Vendor Notes Specialist" at a major computer distributor. Sometime around 1994 a hard drive manufacturer (Connor AFAIK) adopted the sleazy technique of using the non-computer definition of Mega- to describe their drive capacity. This gave them a slight capacity edge in a highly price-sensitive market.
I can tell you, I was pissed at the deception, as were Seagate and other storage manufacturers - but the rest were pressured by their marketing departments to adopt the same measures. Soon, all HDDs and streamers used this convention.
But it got worse. About a year after that, Colorado (I believe) began listing the capacity of their Qic-80 streamers as DOUBLE the actual capacity "because our software compresses the data". This was complete BUNK because their compression CANNOT compress already compressed data (e.g. JPGs or ZIP files).
Enough people screamed about this deception (Marketing=Ministry of Lies) so that shortly thereafter, mfgrs began listing both estimated compressed capacity, as well as native (uncompressed capacities).
Hope this helps.
Linux as a whole would benefit if more distros split into server and workstation versions (or better yet, into server/workstation and appliance versions).
Many, or most people are too dumb and/or lazy to read 5 pages of a manual, let alone any significant portion of the 500,000 pages of (often out-of-date) docs and howtos that accompany a typical linux distro.
A good percentage are even too dumb/lazy to deal with a username/password prompt, or simply type on a keyboard.
These people don't want the flexibility and power of a computer. They want an appliance -- an appliance that turns-on right away, lets them surf the web, watch TV/DVDs, play some games and maybe even type a letter or read email.
If Lindows provides an "appliance-like" user experience, they'll have a fair shot at making some sales to the luser crowd. But to grab any real slice of that market will require OEM integration into cheaper, fast-booting (or state-saving) devices. But this is exactly where Microsoft's exclusivity agreements with OEMs poses a nearly insurmountable barrier to broad access to the retail market.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most technology shows a trend from requiring detailed knowledge (early cars for e.g.) to being as idiot-proof as possible. If a Linux distro such as Lindows aims to achieve mass-market penetration as an "appliance", it needs to:
"Schoop-shoodiyoop shoo-deeyap!" - Mr Bungle
The standard MS-Office document format won't change until M$ makes it the default file format in their "Save File" dialog box.
Look, users are D-U-M-B. Mind-numbingly so. People email me documents written in Office 2000 and when I tell them "Sorry, could you please resend that in a non-proprietary format like RTF?" they look at me as if I just asked, "Saleem, archkyb sloyota mar beekshash fulububbl zarg DYP?"
I mean, they don't even understand that a document can be stored in multiple file formats. I actually have to stand next to them, hold their hand and move the mouse over the drop menu for file formats.
So far the only killing sprees I've engaged-in are of my own brain cells under alcohol-induced apoxia. And I'm not making any promisies concerning the future.
"We have found a witch, may we burn her?"
Prankster powders are definitely out of style.
In germany, people are getting three-year sentences for mailing prank powders. They shut-down the building, call-in the detectives and the spacemen. I can see some justification because the disruption can be very expensive.
I don't recall the exact law that is being violated, but Germany is a country in which threatening or even insulting someone is a punishable offense. I kid you not. Giving someone (esp a govt. official) the finger can be very expensive.
...and the Germans mock the americans for their "blue laws"...
"Good grief." - Charlie Brown