There might be some mechanical issues in letting users swap drives in the DVDChanger device, but yeah, I agree, they should just offer a reasonable choice of configurations (fast CD, DVD-R, etc.), don't overcharge for the drives, and publish the interface. Right now they charge a huge premium for the DVD-RAM version and they don't offer DVD-R.
That said, I don't think a carousel or random access loader is that important. For backup, something like a CD duplicator (e.g. the Niscoa or Primera), which works on a stack of media in serial fashion, should be fine. The Primera mechanisms in particular seem a heck of a lot more robust than those home theater mechanisms. They are built for commercial CD duplication on a 24/7 basis.
I called the DVDchanger.com sales number and got a recording saying nobody was available and inviting me to leave a number. I didn't leave one but might call again sometime.
Niscoa CD Mug. It's a CD autoloader robot that moves CD's (or DVD's) in and out of a regular drive or burner. It's intended for bulk duplication but you can also use it for reading, etc.; and it has enough vertical motion to be able to feed around 5 drives vertically stacked in a tower case.
The robot is controlled by a serial port and
the protocol is documented on the vendor web site. It should be feasible to run the whole thing from a Perl script under GNU/Linux, or whatever.
It doesn't give random access to the discs, but for backups and archiving you don't really need that. There are also comparable devices from
Primera and others.
That said, the DVD Changer thing looks like a pretty good product except for the stupid marketing around it. I'd rather just buy the mechanism with no software and run it myself. Do you think the mechanism itself is crappy, or just the way they sell it?
There is no source code released for the only interesting part of the system, which is the Real codecs. And the source that was released is under a crappy non-libre license. I guess it's an ok story for the developer section but putting it on the front page lens RealMedia Corp undeserved legitimacy.
Nothing stops an intruder from trojaning the known-good-retrieval program either.
Basically to be really careful, you have to do the checks offline, on a separate computer, i.e. not relying on executables running on a system that's been exposed to attackers.
This is the kind of thing that the Palladium hardware should be able to help with. What Microsoft wants to do with it is evil, but it's capable of being used for good purposes too.
If we need an external database of md5's to authenticate so many different files, that means that md5's weren't really the right authentication method to begin with. It's better to use digital signatures.
The fancy way to do that is with an Authenticode-like system for signing files. Distro maintainers would sign the files in their distros, and users could also sign their own files. A simpler way would be to just have a big, signed list of md5's in some file that tripwire checks against. Tripwire would check the signature on the file before believing the md5's in it. Or the list could contain individual signatures per file instead of just hashes.
A centralized md5 database doesn't feel so right with the free software spirit, which says (legitimate) users could modify the files at any time, or just recompile them with a slightly different compiler, etc.
Having the invoices from millions of small businesses all go through the same server in the same format makes that server a VERY juicy source for the Office of Total Information Awareness. This kind of centralization has to be resisted.
Looking at the picture there's a big cooling vent on the top. Putting it on a 1U rackmount shelf with another shelf directly above it would kill the airflow and probably melt the thing down. Other than that, cute idea. They really should have put the fan in the back, using a cooler-running (slower) CPU if need be. Oh well.
You paid for it, it's yours, and you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it.
If some vendor decides, rightly or wrongly, that giving hardware away is a sensible business model, that doesn't in any way entitle them to any control over what you do with it once you take it home. Think of the stupid CueCat bar code wands from Radio Shack. The "legitimate" application intended for those things is long dead, but people continue to do useful things with the wands using software based on reverse engineering them.
Why not just hack the code directly, to make it not bother with the password?
And when are we going to stop giving a damn about consumer gizmos running embedded linux, as long as the actual interesting functions are in some closed application running in the box? The interesting gadgets are the ones that are fully hackable, so the application code comes with source and is easy to customize. Freevo might be a start at a hackable PVR.
I have some experience with scanning piles of paper. For about $5K you can get a production scanner that does 100 pages/minute or so. That means these 3 million pages would take 30,000 minutes or 500 hours to scan, about 12 weeks full time, assuming you could keep the scanner running flat out, which in my experience is not easy.
The work is not very demanding but it's tedious.
Despite the automated equipment you're constantly shuffling paper around and there tends to be a lot of pauses in scanning.
At $10/hour (salary+overhead for some clerical type in a low-wage state) that's about $5K in labor, plus the hardware. Plus there's the matter of 900 boxes of paper--a full trailer load, so another several K$ to get it delivered to where it's being scanned, plus then you have to store it.
Overall, you're looking at $15-20K minimum to scan this stuff. It's sort of possible some organization is interested enough to throw that much cash around. I can't see many individuals willing to do it.
According to the Salon article someone already linked, the Helix license doesn't fulfill the Free Software or Open Source definitions. Royalty-free redistribution is only permitted noncommercially. Also, according to another post, most of the Realplayer codecs--the only parts of Realplayer that are interesting at all--are still closed.
Deep linking has the same issue. URL's are like phone numbers.
The company homepage, www.corp.com, is like the main switchboard number, say 555-1000.
URL's reachable through the home page (www.corp.com/foo/bar) are like internal extensions you can find through the voice menu system (555-1357).
The link with the earnings report is like an extension (555-2468) not on the voice menu, that came off somebody's business card or answering machine or some unknown channel.
That's it. Reuters is being sued over something very much like calling an unlisted direct phone number inside some company. How they got the phone number is, well, irrelevant. They're a news organization, they have reporters, whose job is digging up info like phone numbers.
Deep linking works the same way for anyone else too, of course. Like duh, if you don't want something to be reachable without going through the switchboard, don't give it a direct number exposed to the outside world.
If the new stuff can only receive at such high speeds while still transmitting at low speeds, it's the old broadcast model again, with "producers" and "consumers" of content just like television. Phones were supposed to be so people could talk to each other, not have everyone receive the same stuff from AOL-TW. A fast one-way data phone is just another way for TV to follow us everywhere we go. From a human communications point of view, a device with 1 megabit send and receive is a heck of a lot more interesting than 8 kbps send, 20 megabits receive.
1) The Deep Blue project shut down after winning the 2nd Kasparov match because Kasparov got to be too big a pain to deal with. The DB team was up for a rematch but it didn't happen. So IBM stopped funding the project and the implementers went on to other things. If "talk is cheap" then perhaps you'dlike to fund the project instead of IBM. If not, well, why won't you put your money where your mouth is?
2) Deep Thought was playing at IM level (maybe even GM level) long before Benjamin got involved. And there's no reason at all, none, zip, zero, to think that Deep Fritz is doing a better evaluation at each node than DB did. Quite the opposite. Fritz has to evaluate each node by running some series of Pentium instructions and it has to carefully balance cycles-per-node against available cycles. Adding more terms slows the evaluation down and limits search depth. Deep Blue used a hardware evaluator and if they wanted more evaluation terms they just added more hardware, keeping the nodes/sec constant (within reason).
3) Deep Thought (and maybe the early Deep Blue) played on ICC as "scratchy" for a long time and creamed many GM's and IM's. I don't remember whether it was DT or Hitech that beat GM Bent Larsen in a tournament game, but DT was certainly stronger than Hitech. DT/DB also played a number of "training" games against GM's and apparently did extremely well. GM Robert Byrne lost a two-game match in Hsu's lab, for example, which he wrote about in the NYT.
4) There's no question that GM involvement (not just from Benjamin, but also Dlugy and others) helped Deep Blue. Similarly, the Fritz developers are also getting plenty of GM assistance. What kind of stupid snipe is that, expecting Hsu (who cheerfully admits not being a good chessplayer) to not have strong players helping him? He's entitled to the same kind of help that the Fritz developers get. Plus don't forget, he has the Deep Blue code to work from (he acquired the rights to it when he left IBM).
5) You are deluded if you think preparing against a specific player makes a big difference in performance against that player. It makes a small difference. Opponents (including DB vs Kasparov) prepare against each other because when they're almost evenly matched, they must gain and use any advantage they can, even small ones. However, when they're not evenly matched to start with, preparation doesn't help. That's why Kasparov regularly crushes strong masters in simuls even though they've prepared against him and he's never heard of them. If you think a weak player can beat a strong one by preparing against the strong player, try preparing against Kasparov (or any other GM) yourself sometime, issue a challenge with enough cash behind it to make it worth the GM's while, and see how well you do.
Deep Blue creator Feng-Hsiung Hsu had an interesting
chat session on ICC (Internet Chess Club) that got posted to usenet (linked above). He says the same thing a lot of others have said, that Deep Fritz is nowhere near the strength of Deep Blue. Highlights:
Deep Blue was effectively a 10 TeraOp/sec machine. (Since Deep Fritz runs on eight x86 boxes at 4000 mips each at most, DF's hardware is at least 300 times slower than DB's).
Deep Blue was built with 0.6 micron CMOS and evaluated 200M nodes/sec with 480 parallel chips. A new version built from 0.13 micron CMOS could evaluate 1 billion nodes/sec. A parallel version could evaluate a trillion nodes/sec.
Deep Fritz's promoters are guilty of false advertising when they claim their program beat Deep Blue in 1995. They could not have beaten Deep Blue in 1995 because Deep Blue did not exist in 1995. The machine they beat was Deep Thought II, a forerunner of Deep Blue with much less chess knowledge, 100 times less raw hardware speed, and 1000 times less effective speed.
Hsu says he could write a program today that would kick the stuffing out of Deep Fritz, "even in a simul". I presume that he means using Deep Blue-type parallel hardware so it could massively out-search a pure-software implementation like Deep Fritz. With that type of hardware, he's probably right. With pure software, I'd have to ask him to prove it.
Hsu has a book out about the Deep Blue-Kasparov match, "Behind Deep Blue". It's written for popular audiences and is not very technical, apparently. (I've ordered a copy but hadn't heard of it til seeing the chat transcript).
The IBM Deep Blue 2 hardware is being donated to the Smithsonian Institution. It's kinda sorta possible that it could be made operational again some day.
Anyway, a bunch of folks on the computer chess newsgroup think Kramnik threw at least one game deliberately just in order to keep the match score from being completely lopsided. That's a pretty serious accusation, but it would explain some things. The loss in the 5th game was a beginner's blunder and Kramnik wasn't particularly in time pressure.
Either way, I don't think this match has anything like the quality of the Kasparov-DB2 match.
Unless you really want something pocket sized, MP3 CD players seem a lot more sensible than those hard drive things. They cost under $100 and have "infinite" storage (as many CD-R's as you can burn).
But the capacity of CD-R is just 700 MB/disc, so you need a lot of discs to hold the same stuff as a 20 GB HD jukebox.
This being the case, I wonder why nobody makes one using a DVD mechanism instead of CD. One disc would hold around 80 hours of music (4.7GB) at 128 kbps. In fact you can get double sided DVD-R blanks with 9.4GB capacity if you don't mind flipping the disc over.
If somebody made a DVD-based player that could play audio CD's, and could also play WAV and compressed files (MP3 and Vorbis, natch) on CD-R and DVD-R discs, they'd really have something (hey, it could play DVD Video too, but I wouldn't want to pay for it). It could still cost in the $100 range and except for the larger size, would do most everything the HD units do, with much more flexibility and lower cost.
First of all no 20GB drive is currently available that will fit in the Mobilphile. The Mobilphile uses Toshiba's PCMCIA type II 5 GB HD card, which costs about $200 on ebay. It doesn't look like it will take the thicker embedded 1.8" 20 GB drive that the Ipod uses, or the even bigger 2.5" laptop drives that units like the Nomad 3 use.
Use the Toshiba Audio Application Software to convert various types of digital audio files on a PC hard drive to a rights-protected program recognized by MOBILPHILE. User can expand MOBILPHILE's functionality to include playback of custom music collections encoded in the MP3, WMA or WAV formats.
CONVENIENCE
Toshiba Audio Application Software
Toshiba proprietary software program makes media manipulation a breeze. This software enables the user to convert MP3,
WAV or WMA files to a rights protected data format recognized by MOBILPHILE. Once converted, the Toshiba Audio Application software allows you to transfer files directly to the MEG50AS.
So it looks like the unit has some obnoxious DRM built in and it can't play unprotected MP3's. You have to convert your files using some proprietary Windoze program even though it runs Linux internally. You can't just stick the PCMCIA drive into your laptop and dump MP3's to it, which to me would have been the main attraction of this thing. Plus, it costs $495, which is way more than I want to play for an MP3 player, even an Ipod.
I also wonder how GPL-friendly the thing can be if it's got that DRM stuff. Unless the hardware itself implements the DRM, I don't see how they can give out the source code without making the DRM defeatable.
Some laptops use as much as 70 watts of power. That's not much less than a human being uses at rest (such as sitting in an airline seat). Airlines barely circulate enough air into the cabin now to keep people from passing out. With fuel cells sucking up more of the available oxygens, airlines may have to provide more air--and they might not get around real soon to doing that. I hope it doesn't cause anyone serious breathing problems.
Could someone please post a feature list of what BitKeeper does that comparable free programs don't? There may be such a list already, so a url would be fine. It's time for free source control programs to get whatever capabilities that they're missing. Since I've never seen BitKeeper myself, I'd like to know what new stuff needs to be implemented.
This isn't like a bug in Apache httpd, or for that matter like a bug in IIS or Outlook. It's more like a bug in some infrequently used IIS plug-in. I don't think either would merit getting on/.'s front page.
Paul Ginsparg is a great choice for receiving an award. His arxiv.org server has had a huge impact on scientific publishing by distributing papers for free online.
The Slashdot story The Future of Scientific Publishing describes some of that impact. Arxiv.org has been doing for math and science papers what the FSF has been doing for software.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I don't think a carousel or random access loader is that important. For backup, something like a CD duplicator (e.g. the Niscoa or Primera), which works on a stack of media in serial fashion, should be fine. The Primera mechanisms in particular seem a heck of a lot more robust than those home theater mechanisms. They are built for commercial CD duplication on a 24/7 basis.
I called the DVDchanger.com sales number and got a recording saying nobody was available and inviting me to leave a number. I didn't leave one but might call again sometime.
The next best thing to rock and chisel.
It doesn't give random access to the discs, but for backups and archiving you don't really need that. There are also comparable devices from Primera and others.
That said, the DVD Changer thing looks like a pretty good product except for the stupid marketing around it. I'd rather just buy the mechanism with no software and run it myself. Do you think the mechanism itself is crappy, or just the way they sell it?
There is no source code released for the only interesting part of the system, which is the Real codecs. And the source that was released is under a crappy non-libre license. I guess it's an ok story for the developer section but putting it on the front page lens RealMedia Corp undeserved legitimacy.
Basically to be really careful, you have to do the checks offline, on a separate computer, i.e. not relying on executables running on a system that's been exposed to attackers.
This is the kind of thing that the Palladium hardware should be able to help with. What Microsoft wants to do with it is evil, but it's capable of being used for good purposes too.
The fancy way to do that is with an Authenticode-like system for signing files. Distro maintainers would sign the files in their distros, and users could also sign their own files. A simpler way would be to just have a big, signed list of md5's in some file that tripwire checks against. Tripwire would check the signature on the file before believing the md5's in it. Or the list could contain individual signatures per file instead of just hashes.
A centralized md5 database doesn't feel so right with the free software spirit, which says (legitimate) users could modify the files at any time, or just recompile them with a slightly different compiler, etc.
Having the invoices from millions of small businesses all go through the same server in the same format makes that server a VERY juicy source for the Office of Total Information Awareness. This kind of centralization has to be resisted.
But you still need to catch that exception. What if you get that open file object, close it, and then try to close it a second time?
Looking at the picture there's a big cooling vent on the top. Putting it on a 1U rackmount shelf with another shelf directly above it would kill the airflow and probably melt the thing down. Other than that, cute idea. They really should have put the fan in the back, using a cooler-running (slower) CPU if need be. Oh well.
If some vendor decides, rightly or wrongly, that giving hardware away is a sensible business model, that doesn't in any way entitle them to any control over what you do with it once you take it home. Think of the stupid CueCat bar code wands from Radio Shack. The "legitimate" application intended for those things is long dead, but people continue to do useful things with the wands using software based on reverse engineering them.
And when are we going to stop giving a damn about consumer gizmos running embedded linux, as long as the actual interesting functions are in some closed application running in the box? The interesting gadgets are the ones that are fully hackable, so the application code comes with source and is easy to customize. Freevo might be a start at a hackable PVR.
At $10/hour (salary+overhead for some clerical type in a low-wage state) that's about $5K in labor, plus the hardware. Plus there's the matter of 900 boxes of paper--a full trailer load, so another several K$ to get it delivered to where it's being scanned, plus then you have to store it. Overall, you're looking at $15-20K minimum to scan this stuff. It's sort of possible some organization is interested enough to throw that much cash around. I can't see many individuals willing to do it.
According to the Salon article someone already linked, the Helix license doesn't fulfill the Free Software or Open Source definitions. Royalty-free redistribution is only permitted noncommercially. Also, according to another post, most of the Realplayer codecs--the only parts of Realplayer that are interesting at all--are still closed.
The company homepage, www.corp.com, is like the main switchboard number, say 555-1000.
URL's reachable through the home page (www.corp.com/foo/bar) are like internal extensions you can find through the voice menu system (555-1357).
The link with the earnings report is like an extension (555-2468) not on the voice menu, that came off somebody's business card or answering machine or some unknown channel.
That's it. Reuters is being sued over something very much like calling an unlisted direct phone number inside some company. How they got the phone number is, well, irrelevant. They're a news organization, they have reporters, whose job is digging up info like phone numbers.
Deep linking works the same way for anyone else too, of course. Like duh, if you don't want something to be reachable without going through the switchboard, don't give it a direct number exposed to the outside world.
4x standard was approved by DVD-R consortium (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 21, @01:12PM (#4496830)
Thus this practice you mention is now in the past. The Pioneer doesn't need to special case media anymore to support 2X and 4X.
If the new stuff can only receive at such high speeds while still transmitting at low speeds, it's the old broadcast model again, with "producers" and "consumers" of content just like television. Phones were supposed to be so people could talk to each other, not have everyone receive the same stuff from AOL-TW. A fast one-way data phone is just another way for TV to follow us everywhere we go. From a human communications point of view, a device with 1 megabit send and receive is a heck of a lot more interesting than 8 kbps send, 20 megabits receive.
2) Deep Thought was playing at IM level (maybe even GM level) long before Benjamin got involved. And there's no reason at all, none, zip, zero, to think that Deep Fritz is doing a better evaluation at each node than DB did. Quite the opposite. Fritz has to evaluate each node by running some series of Pentium instructions and it has to carefully balance cycles-per-node against available cycles. Adding more terms slows the evaluation down and limits search depth. Deep Blue used a hardware evaluator and if they wanted more evaluation terms they just added more hardware, keeping the nodes/sec constant (within reason).
3) Deep Thought (and maybe the early Deep Blue) played on ICC as "scratchy" for a long time and creamed many GM's and IM's. I don't remember whether it was DT or Hitech that beat GM Bent Larsen in a tournament game, but DT was certainly stronger than Hitech. DT/DB also played a number of "training" games against GM's and apparently did extremely well. GM Robert Byrne lost a two-game match in Hsu's lab, for example, which he wrote about in the NYT.
4) There's no question that GM involvement (not just from Benjamin, but also Dlugy and others) helped Deep Blue. Similarly, the Fritz developers are also getting plenty of GM assistance. What kind of stupid snipe is that, expecting Hsu (who cheerfully admits not being a good chessplayer) to not have strong players helping him? He's entitled to the same kind of help that the Fritz developers get. Plus don't forget, he has the Deep Blue code to work from (he acquired the rights to it when he left IBM).
5) You are deluded if you think preparing against a specific player makes a big difference in performance against that player. It makes a small difference. Opponents (including DB vs Kasparov) prepare against each other because when they're almost evenly matched, they must gain and use any advantage they can, even small ones. However, when they're not evenly matched to start with, preparation doesn't help. That's why Kasparov regularly crushes strong masters in simuls even though they've prepared against him and he's never heard of them. If you think a weak player can beat a strong one by preparing against the strong player, try preparing against Kasparov (or any other GM) yourself sometime, issue a challenge with enough cash behind it to make it worth the GM's while, and see how well you do.
- Deep Blue was effectively a 10 TeraOp/sec machine. (Since Deep Fritz runs on eight x86 boxes at 4000 mips each at most, DF's hardware is at least 300 times slower than DB's).
- Deep Blue was built with 0.6 micron CMOS and evaluated 200M nodes/sec with 480 parallel chips. A new version built from 0.13 micron CMOS could evaluate 1 billion nodes/sec. A parallel version could evaluate a trillion nodes/sec.
- Deep Fritz's promoters are guilty of false advertising when they claim their program beat Deep Blue in 1995. They could not have beaten Deep Blue in 1995 because Deep Blue did not exist in 1995. The machine they beat was Deep Thought II, a forerunner of Deep Blue with much less chess knowledge, 100 times less raw hardware speed, and 1000 times less effective speed.
- Hsu says he could write a program today that would kick the stuffing out of Deep Fritz, "even in a simul". I presume that he means using Deep Blue-type parallel hardware so it could massively out-search a pure-software implementation like Deep Fritz. With that type of hardware, he's probably right. With pure software, I'd have to ask him to prove it.
- Hsu has a book out about the Deep Blue-Kasparov match, "Behind Deep Blue". It's written for popular audiences and is not very technical, apparently. (I've ordered a copy but hadn't heard of it til seeing the chat transcript).
- The IBM Deep Blue 2 hardware is being donated to the Smithsonian Institution. It's kinda sorta possible that it could be made operational again some day.
Anyway, a bunch of folks on the computer chess newsgroup think Kramnik threw at least one game deliberately just in order to keep the match score from being completely lopsided. That's a pretty serious accusation, but it would explain some things. The loss in the 5th game was a beginner's blunder and Kramnik wasn't particularly in time pressure.Either way, I don't think this match has anything like the quality of the Kasparov-DB2 match.
This being the case, I wonder why nobody makes one using a DVD mechanism instead of CD. One disc would hold around 80 hours of music (4.7GB) at 128 kbps. In fact you can get double sided DVD-R blanks with 9.4GB capacity if you don't mind flipping the disc over.
If somebody made a DVD-based player that could play audio CD's, and could also play WAV and compressed files (MP3 and Vorbis, natch) on CD-R and DVD-R discs, they'd really have something (hey, it could play DVD Video too, but I wouldn't want to pay for it). It could still cost in the $100 range and except for the larger size, would do most everything the HD units do, with much more flexibility and lower cost.
What bothers me a lot more is this:
So it looks like the unit has some obnoxious DRM built in and it can't play unprotected MP3's. You have to convert your files using some proprietary Windoze program even though it runs Linux internally. You can't just stick the PCMCIA drive into your laptop and dump MP3's to it, which to me would have been the main attraction of this thing. Plus, it costs $495, which is way more than I want to play for an MP3 player, even an Ipod.I also wonder how GPL-friendly the thing can be if it's got that DRM stuff. Unless the hardware itself implements the DRM, I don't see how they can give out the source code without making the DRM defeatable.
Some laptops use as much as 70 watts of power. That's not much less than a human being uses at rest (such as sitting in an airline seat). Airlines barely circulate enough air into the cabin now to keep people from passing out. With fuel cells sucking up more of the available oxygens, airlines may have to provide more air--and they might not get around real soon to doing that. I hope it doesn't cause anyone serious breathing problems.
Could someone please post a feature list of what BitKeeper does that comparable free programs don't? There may be such a list already, so a url would be fine. It's time for free source control programs to get whatever capabilities that they're missing. Since I've never seen BitKeeper myself, I'd like to know what new stuff needs to be implemented.
This isn't like a bug in Apache httpd, or for that matter like a bug in IIS or Outlook. It's more like a bug in some infrequently used IIS plug-in. I don't think either would merit getting on /.'s front page.
Way to go, Macarthur Foundation!
How do you get off of SPEWS once you're listed incorrectly? There's no quick straightforward way.