I am a huge supporter of freedom of speech. I do not believe that the government should restrict any speech that does not cause direct harm to an individual (e.g. hosting web pages with pirated software or child pornography should not be illegal IMHO). However, I have to agree with the judge in this case: linking to articles that provide detailed instructions for sabotaging trains and killing dozens, if not hundreds of innocent people, should not be tolerated. Free speech is a privilege, not a right, and it should be used responsibly - not to hurt people. Posting instructions on how to cook meth (which harms no-one) is a reasonable exercise of one's first amendment rights. But posting instructions on how to derail passenger trains, how to build C-4 bombs, or how to permanently destroy a woman's mink coat is inexcusable and deserves no protection.
All major religions are based on the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself. If you weigh this when you're considering posting something controversial to the internet, you will be better able to decide what is an appropriate expression and what is only going to hurt people.
Although the majority of experienced UNIX gurus run Linux on their desktops, a surprising number of us (myself included) prefer the Berkeley-inspired eccentricities of BSD. The good news here is that FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have Linux compatibility kernel modules that have all been verified to work with the new Linux release of the Sorenson codec. As a graphics designer, Apple's anti-freedom, closed-source licensing policy on QuickTime was the only reason why I have had to keep a Windows machine around until now, but this development will make it possible for me to de-Microsoft my office and install Gentoo on my spare machine. Bravo for the Xine team!
It is a well-known fact that the fastest P4 (2.2Ghz) is easily outperformed
by the fastest Athlon (Athlon XP 2000).
As the operations manager for a medium-sized business, I am responsible for
approving or denying acquisition requests (ARs as we call them). And I
will strongly encourage my employees to buy Intel machines over AMD
machines if they want their AR approved. Why is that? Although I am very
impressed with the speed of AMD chips, and very unimpressed with RDRAM and
P4s' performance (did you know they reduce the cache memory clock as they
increase the core speed to prevent overheating?), P4s are an order of
magnitude more stable than Athlons. Having seen several Athlongs crash and
burn in the past two years, I have been refreshing AnandTech every morning
awaiting the release of a comparably speeded P4.
Most businesses hire smart people, and there are probably thousands of
people just like me who want the speed of an AMD chip, coupled with the
reliability and quality of an Intel chip. Well, the day has finally come,
and Intel will sell these chips faster than they can restock the shelves.
Good for them.
If you've ever used a DirecTV system, you would realize that DTV provides about two weeks of guide data no matter what receiver you use. Meaning that Tivo's "service" gives you... surprise! nothing you're not already paying for.
2.5xtreme is there to unlock the crippleware called Tivo. If you bothered to read its documentation, you would find that all it does is remove the silly "can't record until you pay" restriction built into the Tivo. Again - letting you take full advantage of the hardware you spent your hard-earned parents' money on.
2.5xtreme has nothing to do with stealing DirecTV service. Typically stealing DTV service requires you to buy several hundred dollars of equipment and hook up a dedicated computer to fake an access card. It's hardly cost-effective and it isn't possible to steal a single channel with the xtreme software.
As a proud owner of a Philips DirecTivo unit with TivoNet and (most
recently) a ReplayTV 4000, I have had a chance to evaluate both machines
and see their relative strengths and weaknesses. The results have been
interesting:
Neither unit forces you to pay for service (with the Tivo, just
load 2.5xtreme and turn on "SubTest"). However, the Replay units are sold
at a significant markup and the Tivo units are sold below cost. I'm no
market analysist, but three guesses which one is better for consumers?
Tivo can't update the software without notice, unless you're dumb
enough to plug the unit into your phone line. Replay requires that you
maintain a connection to their servers so they can tamper with your
property after purchase.
The Tivo has a 30 second commercial skip feature too, contrary to
popular opinion. SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT.
The Tivo runs Linux, meaning that you can cross-compile anything
to run on it, short of MS Office and IE. What can you run on the Replay?
Next to nothing.
The Tivo has a programmer-friendly interface. It has native tcl
support and provides easy ways to access the system database, called MFS.
Does Replay offer this? I think not.
The Tivo gets its guide data off the air; the Replay needs to connect
to a central server to get it. What happens when Replay goes bankrupt?
You got it - no more guide data.
For these reasons and many usability reasons, I will be returning my Replay
unit before the 30-day exchange period expires. It's just an overpriced
piece of crap.
As a longtime audiophile and a fan of digital music and all things open
source, I was quite excited when I read about Xiph's Ogg Vorbis project. I
had high hopes for the new format; unencumbered by patents and
restrictions, the Ogg team was working on a way to replace the tinny, empty
sound of MP3 that had become so prevalent in most online song swapping
venues. I looked forward to a new revolution, where I could listen to
CD-quality sound from my computer and truly appreciate the depth of tone
that had previously been belted out of my Harmon Kardon AVR 520.
But alas, Ogg has disappointed me. Although it blows MP3, Real, and
especially WMA out of the water on telephone-quality 56k streams, it
produced nothing but unpleasantness for me when I attempted to use it to
recreate the trebelish peaks and bassive lows of Rachmaninoff's work. In
some ways, MP3 was almost easier to listen to, because I had become
accustomed to its quirks.
Thus, Ogg has found its niche: low bandwidth applications benefit
enormously by the nearly lossless compression that it offers for low-speed
streams. As for music distribution - so far there are no clear contenders,
but hopefully someday a format will exist that does an acceptable job of
re-creating music the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
"I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are
completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a
cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the
same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not
matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked. The press must learn that
misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an
automobile."
At first glance, one might attribute that statement to a computer-illiterate senator or
to an incompetent journalist. You
may be surprised, then, to find that this quote was from Ken Thompson in 1995. Yes,
one of our own - a creator of the UNIX system and the command line we use
every single day - condemned the antisocial activities of malicious
computer users. Which leads me to ask: why aren't we listening, and
where is our moral compass?
A few years ago, it was all the media's fault: the media gave much attention to
antisocial criminals who happened to
use computers. Nowadays, computer crime is rarely front-page news, especially
in light of the recent terrorist attacks caused by the usual suspects. So what kind of notoriety,
then, are these criminally
insane geeks seeking? The fact of the matter is that the open source
community here on Slashdot is not only
tolerating illicit behavior; it is encouraging
it. We are partially responsible for every Brian
West, Eric Corley, Dmitri Skylarov, Ted
Felten, Randal
Schwartz,, and DrinkOrDie member. We are harboring criminals because we
are glorifying their acts and lauding them for "civil disobedience." We are
not unlike the Arabs who cheered
as they watched the Twin Towers collapse on their (banned) TV sets. And like
those ungrateful Arabs, we owe our prosperity to the American government and the capitalist society
that so many users here seem to despise. We have become our own enemy.
We, as a community, need to stop tolerating this behavior. Instead of
encouraging people like Jon Johansen by sending money to the EFF to help them
keep these ingrates' lilly white asses out of jail, we need to send a strong
message that computer crime is not consistent with our ethical standards. We
need to lead by example - log off of Gnutella, start paying for software (even
Windows), stop cracking your DVDs and eBooks "for fun," and start acting like
an upstanding citizen. It is only then that the powers that be will start taking us
seriously and repeal the DMCA/SSSCA/PATRIOT legislation, and start giving us
our rights back. It is crystal clear that we will not get our rights
back a moment before we get out of the business of producing criminals, and the
first step is to stop empathizing with them.
About a year ago, I was sentenced to do community service to get a nasty
DUI conviction expunged, so (as a computer geek) I chose to help educate
youngsters at the local middle school's computer lab. Although their
existing course taught them Qbasic, I convinced the instructor (really,
just the librarian) to pursue open source alternatives to the proprietary
Microsoft-controlled language. I had recommended Perl but we agreed that
Python was easier to learn and would be of greater use to the young'uns.
The results were quite simply amazing: some of the more precocious students
were writing GTK applications by the end of the semester. The slower
students stuck to the prescribed assignments (the usual checkbook balancing
software and such) - yet nobody had any serious problems learning the
language because it was very intuitive. At the end of the course, we had
the students design and implement a piece of software on a written exam,
and I am pleased to say that nobody produced less than C-grade work.
As a former FreeBSD committer, I worked extensively with the team that produced the JRE/JDK project. Since programming languages can only be protected by patents (not copyrights), our original intention was to craft a clean-room version of Java that we could release under the BSD license, just like everything else in our distribution. Unfortunately, manpower was tight, and we were not able to do it all on our own. Hence, we discussed the matter with Sun and (IMHO) compromised our principles (unrestricted distribution in source and binary forms) in order to get the project done.
Our experience should serve as an important lesson to open source developers who try to tackle too large a project by themselves: do not sell your soul to Corporate America. Sure, we have a native JRE/JDK, but the only advantage is that it is native - not Free in any stretch of the imagination. (Not even restricted-Free, e.g. GPL).
All that aside, I have been testing several snapshots of the Java tools and they are very responsive and stable. More so, I am afraid, than Blackdown - although the ultimate test will be to see how it compares with the JRE running on a Solaris/SPARC machine.
X10 has adopted some rather ruthless marketing practices, so anybody concerned about their right not to be subjected to pop-under Flash ads on every other site should boycott X10.
Typically, when I am helping my clients or friends make a choice between using Free software or
"stretching licenses" for commercial software, I use the comparison:
"Why rob a bank when the credit union next door is handing out $100 bills?"
About two years ago, my son's grade school upgraded their computer lab and,
as a concerned parent, I was on the advisory committee for that.
Originally they had planned to do an all-NT installation for security and
usability reasons, but we did a cost-benefit analysis and found that the
licensing would have cost us an arm and a leg.
So, we arrived at a compromise: although I wanted a straight FreeBSD shop,
we settled for Linux on the desktops and FreeBSD on the servers, provided
that the Linux USB support and stability improved. We still use the 2.2
kernel series with backported USB support, and are running FreeBSD
4.0-STABLE on all of the servers (which, by the way, have not been rebooted
since they were installed).
When the numbers came in, we found that we were able to afford 20 extra
computer systems (!) by not paying the Microsoft tax. Also, we were able
to hire a sysadmin very cheap who works remotely (he has been banned from
the school grounds), and found in our analysis that we would have needed to
pay about three times as much to get the MCSEs that it would have taken to
keep an NT shop running smoothly.
So, the school board wins and the kids win with Open Source. That is the
way it should be.
freebsd guy
And this is what's wrong with NASA
on
802.11b Space Suits
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Back in 1969, I watched with amazement as we first landed on the moon, and I wondered what would come next. Space colonies? Lunar waste disposal? The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life?
Nowadays, I read space.com and feel an overwhelming sense of depression. I see billions of tax dollars wasted on multimillion dollar toy space suits, and paying large salaries to Slashdot trolls and other function-free individuals.
NASA is a drain on the nation's economy, and we need to send them a clear message: shape up or ship out. We need to run them like the R&D division in a corporation: if they can't produce useful results, innovations, and profit within a few years, we need to start cutting projects and staff. I want to see NASA become synonymous with "technical progress" like it was when I grew up; right now, it is synonymous with "wasted tax money" and that is not a favorable label to have during such a terrible recession.
I live in one of the wealthier (better) suburbs of Atlanta and our service has been going for a few months. My observations:
It's lightning fast. They only have a handful of subscribers in my area though, so it is unclear how well they will deal with demand.
It is very reliable. We have had maybe three outages, two of which were caused by the crappy openbsd router panicking for no apparent reason.
Rain fade is an issue. It doesn't cut out completely, but it is noticably slower when the weather is bad. Same goes for snow; it caused us some packet loss.
They haven't completely figured out how to do billing accurately. We have gotten about two months for free because of their mistakes. Oh well, they are a big faceless corporation so they can afford it.
Installation was a snap. Compared to pointing a DirecTV dish, this was *very* easy to set up.
Latency is sometimes not cool. But I don't have the time to piss away on games and it's good enough for telnet/ssh.
Many of my friends are just itching to replace their overpriced DSL/cable modems with this. I wish Earthlink the best of luck in expanding this service everywhere; the demand is there.
Studies have shown that decriminalizing drug use removes the societal stigma that keeps addiction rates low. And since our government has plenty of money (look at the deductions on your next paycheck if you don't believe me), maintaining a war on drugs really doesn't take a big chunk out of the budget. And it is worth every penny to anyone who cares about their children and friends.
Dropping the war on drugs is only slightly less absurd than dropping laws against murder. Drugs destroy families, friendships, and lives; why should our government encourage their use?
I used to be an engineer at Maxtor.
Though my job was entirely on the software end (maintaining Max-Blast, the
drive fitness tester, and other assorted hack jobs), I had several friends
who designed and tested drive hardware, and we sat down a few months back
to talk about the 75GXP problems. As it turns out, those issues are
closely related to the implementation of the GMR head.
IBM's major problem was that,
although they were able to scale down the GMR head very easily, they had
large stocks of old media that was not certified for use on GMR drives.
(Incidentally, most of that media is in an enormous warehouse in Hungary,
which is where most of their drives are produced now.) They designed a
recertification process that was supposed to allow them to separate the
media that would be suitable for the 75GXPs from the media that wasn't
suitable, but that process was deeply flawed and this resulted in the high
failure rates of their drives.
You may find it a bit odd to be hearing this from a former Maxtor employee.
Well, the dirty little secret of storage companies is that reverse
engineering is rampant. My colleagues at Maxtor probed, disassembled, and
tested the IBM drives; indeed, they might have known what the bug was
even before IBM did.
So, the obvious RISK of GMR technology is: do not use platters that are not
certified for use with the new heads. Those who disregard this creed are
certain to meet with a nasty public relations disaster in due time.
Slashdot Mirror
first soccer sucks post
All major religions are based on the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself. If you weigh this when you're considering posting something controversial to the internet, you will be better able to decide what is an appropriate expression and what is only going to hurt people.
Just my 2c.
freebsd guy
freebsd guy
As the operations manager for a medium-sized business, I am responsible for approving or denying acquisition requests (ARs as we call them). And I will strongly encourage my employees to buy Intel machines over AMD machines if they want their AR approved. Why is that? Although I am very impressed with the speed of AMD chips, and very unimpressed with RDRAM and P4s' performance (did you know they reduce the cache memory clock as they increase the core speed to prevent overheating?), P4s are an order of magnitude more stable than Athlons. Having seen several Athlongs crash and burn in the past two years, I have been refreshing AnandTech every morning awaiting the release of a comparably speeded P4.
Most businesses hire smart people, and there are probably thousands of people just like me who want the speed of an AMD chip, coupled with the reliability and quality of an Intel chip. Well, the day has finally come, and Intel will sell these chips faster than they can restock the shelves. Good for them.
freebsd guy
2.5xtreme is there to unlock the crippleware called Tivo. If you bothered to read its documentation, you would find that all it does is remove the silly "can't record until you pay" restriction built into the Tivo. Again - letting you take full advantage of the hardware you spent your hard-earned parents' money on.
2.5xtreme has nothing to do with stealing DirecTV service. Typically stealing DTV service requires you to buy several hundred dollars of equipment and hook up a dedicated computer to fake an access card. It's hardly cost-effective and it isn't possible to steal a single channel with the xtreme software.
freebsd guy
- Neither unit forces you to pay for service (with the Tivo, just
load 2.5xtreme and turn on "SubTest"). However, the Replay units are sold
at a significant markup and the Tivo units are sold below cost. I'm no
market analysist, but three guesses which one is better for consumers?
- Tivo can't update the software without notice, unless you're dumb
enough to plug the unit into your phone line. Replay requires that you
maintain a connection to their servers so they can tamper with your
property after purchase.
- The Tivo has a 30 second commercial skip feature too, contrary to
popular opinion. SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT.
- The Tivo runs Linux, meaning that you can cross-compile anything
to run on it, short of MS Office and IE. What can you run on the Replay?
Next to nothing.
- The Tivo has a programmer-friendly interface. It has native tcl
support and provides easy ways to access the system database, called MFS.
Does Replay offer this? I think not.
- The Tivo gets its guide data off the air; the Replay needs to connect
to a central server to get it. What happens when Replay goes bankrupt?
You got it - no more guide data.
For these reasons and many usability reasons, I will be returning my Replay unit before the 30-day exchange period expires. It's just an overpriced piece of crap.freebsd guy
But alas, Ogg has disappointed me. Although it blows MP3, Real, and especially WMA out of the water on telephone-quality 56k streams, it produced nothing but unpleasantness for me when I attempted to use it to recreate the trebelish peaks and bassive lows of Rachmaninoff's work. In some ways, MP3 was almost easier to listen to, because I had become accustomed to its quirks.
Thus, Ogg has found its niche: low bandwidth applications benefit enormously by the nearly lossless compression that it offers for low-speed streams. As for music distribution - so far there are no clear contenders, but hopefully someday a format will exist that does an acceptable job of re-creating music the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
freebsd guy
At first glance, one might attribute that statement to a computer-illiterate senator or to an incompetent journalist. You may be surprised, then, to find that this quote was from Ken Thompson in 1995. Yes, one of our own - a creator of the UNIX system and the command line we use every single day - condemned the antisocial activities of malicious computer users. Which leads me to ask: why aren't we listening, and where is our moral compass?
A few years ago, it was all the media's fault: the media gave much attention to antisocial criminals who happened to use computers. Nowadays, computer crime is rarely front-page news, especially in light of the recent terrorist attacks caused by the usual suspects. So what kind of notoriety, then, are these criminally insane geeks seeking? The fact of the matter is that the open source community here on Slashdot is not only tolerating illicit behavior; it is encouraging it. We are partially responsible for every Brian West, Eric Corley, Dmitri Skylarov, Ted Felten, Randal Schwartz,, and DrinkOrDie member. We are harboring criminals because we are glorifying their acts and lauding them for "civil disobedience." We are not unlike the Arabs who cheered as they watched the Twin Towers collapse on their (banned) TV sets. And like those ungrateful Arabs, we owe our prosperity to the American government and the capitalist society that so many users here seem to despise. We have become our own enemy.
We, as a community, need to stop tolerating this behavior. Instead of encouraging people like Jon Johansen by sending money to the EFF to help them keep these ingrates' lilly white asses out of jail, we need to send a strong message that computer crime is not consistent with our ethical standards. We need to lead by example - log off of Gnutella, start paying for software (even Windows), stop cracking your DVDs and eBooks "for fun," and start acting like an upstanding citizen. It is only then that the powers that be will start taking us seriously and repeal the DMCA/SSSCA/PATRIOT legislation, and start giving us our rights back. It is crystal clear that we will not get our rights back a moment before we get out of the business of producing criminals, and the first step is to stop empathizing with them.
freebsd guy
The results were quite simply amazing: some of the more precocious students were writing GTK applications by the end of the semester. The slower students stuck to the prescribed assignments (the usual checkbook balancing software and such) - yet nobody had any serious problems learning the language because it was very intuitive. At the end of the course, we had the students design and implement a piece of software on a written exam, and I am pleased to say that nobody produced less than C-grade work.
freebsd guy
Our experience should serve as an important lesson to open source developers who try to tackle too large a project by themselves: do not sell your soul to Corporate America. Sure, we have a native JRE/JDK, but the only advantage is that it is native - not Free in any stretch of the imagination. (Not even restricted-Free, e.g. GPL).
All that aside, I have been testing several snapshots of the Java tools and they are very responsive and stable. More so, I am afraid, than Blackdown - although the ultimate test will be to see how it compares with the JRE running on a Solaris/SPARC machine.
freebsd guy
freebsd guy
"Why rob a bank when the credit union next door is handing out $100 bills?"
And that analogy is perfect for this situation.
freebsd guy
So, we arrived at a compromise: although I wanted a straight FreeBSD shop, we settled for Linux on the desktops and FreeBSD on the servers, provided that the Linux USB support and stability improved. We still use the 2.2 kernel series with backported USB support, and are running FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE on all of the servers (which, by the way, have not been rebooted since they were installed).
When the numbers came in, we found that we were able to afford 20 extra computer systems (!) by not paying the Microsoft tax. Also, we were able to hire a sysadmin very cheap who works remotely (he has been banned from the school grounds), and found in our analysis that we would have needed to pay about three times as much to get the MCSEs that it would have taken to keep an NT shop running smoothly.
So, the school board wins and the kids win with Open Source. That is the way it should be.
freebsd guy
Nowadays, I read space.com and feel an overwhelming sense of depression. I see billions of tax dollars wasted on multimillion dollar toy space suits, and paying large salaries to Slashdot trolls and other function-free individuals.
NASA is a drain on the nation's economy, and we need to send them a clear message: shape up or ship out. We need to run them like the R&D division in a corporation: if they can't produce useful results, innovations, and profit within a few years, we need to start cutting projects and staff. I want to see NASA become synonymous with "technical progress" like it was when I grew up; right now, it is synonymous with "wasted tax money" and that is not a favorable label to have during such a terrible recession.
freebsd guy
- It's lightning fast. They only have a handful of subscribers in my area though, so it is unclear how well they will deal with demand.
- It is very reliable. We have had maybe three outages, two of which were caused by the crappy openbsd router panicking for no apparent reason.
- Rain fade is an issue. It doesn't cut out completely, but it is noticably slower when the weather is bad. Same goes for snow; it caused us some packet loss.
- They haven't completely figured out how to do billing accurately. We have gotten about two months for free because of their mistakes. Oh well, they are a big faceless corporation so they can afford it.
- Installation was a snap. Compared to pointing a DirecTV dish, this was *very* easy to set up.
- Latency is sometimes not cool. But I don't have the time to piss away on games and it's good enough for telnet/ssh.
Many of my friends are just itching to replace their overpriced DSL/cable modems with this. I wish Earthlink the best of luck in expanding this service everywhere; the demand is there.freebsd guy
Studies have shown that decriminalizing drug use removes the societal stigma that keeps addiction rates low. And since our government has plenty of money (look at the deductions on your next paycheck if you don't believe me), maintaining a war on drugs really doesn't take a big chunk out of the budget. And it is worth every penny to anyone who cares about their children and friends.
Dropping the war on drugs is only slightly less absurd than dropping laws against murder. Drugs destroy families, friendships, and lives; why should our government encourage their use?
freebsd guy
IBM's major problem was that, although they were able to scale down the GMR head very easily, they had large stocks of old media that was not certified for use on GMR drives. (Incidentally, most of that media is in an enormous warehouse in Hungary, which is where most of their drives are produced now.) They designed a recertification process that was supposed to allow them to separate the media that would be suitable for the 75GXPs from the media that wasn't suitable, but that process was deeply flawed and this resulted in the high failure rates of their drives.
You may find it a bit odd to be hearing this from a former Maxtor employee. Well, the dirty little secret of storage companies is that reverse engineering is rampant. My colleagues at Maxtor probed, disassembled, and tested the IBM drives; indeed, they might have known what the bug was even before IBM did.
So, the obvious RISK of GMR technology is: do not use platters that are not certified for use with the new heads. Those who disregard this creed are certain to meet with a nasty public relations disaster in due time.
freebsd guy